Bloghttp://www.alliterative.net/blog/Thu, 30 Nov 2017 23:15:48 +0000en-CASite-Server v6.0.0-19924-19924 (http://www.squarespace.com)An Alliterative Blog - A Gallery of IdeasBack to the FutureMark SundaramThu, 30 Nov 2017 23:38:57 +0000http://www.alliterative.net/blog/2017/11/30/back-to-the-future53b1a859e4b037526d8e159f:53bf2b11e4b0228b71b8ae4e:5a2091240d9297f9736e5225This time our video takes a look at whether or not the English language has a future tense:

This work is largely drawn from my own doctoral dissertation, so it kind of feels like going back in time and revisiting the topic! In this blog post I’m going to (gonna? I’ma?) go into some more of the detailed grammatical background of this topic for those of you who are (like me) real grammar nerds. Of course this still only scratches the surface, so if there are any real keeners out there perhaps I’ll post a copy of my dissertation too. Let me know if you’d like to see that.

As a comparison to how the English futural constructions work, it’s useful to have a look at how tense works in a language that certainly does have a grammatical future tense, Latin. For the verb amare “to love” the present tense (in the first person singular) is amo “I love”. To make it a future tense you add a different ending, amabo “I will love”. So one word on its own can express the basic idea of futurity, unlike “will love” in English, though being formed with a single word isn’t essential to a grammatical tense. But let’s jump forward to see what happens in French, which is a descendant of Latin. Because of sound changes that happened in the transitional stage called Vulgar Latin, it became difficult to distinguish between future tense as in amabit “she will love” and past tense as in amavit “she loved”, an obvious problem. So Vulgar Latin dumped the one-word future tense and started using an auxiliary verb, the verb habere “to have”, to form a new futural construction, as in amare habeo “I will love”. What happened next was that auxiliary verb habeo got simplified down and glued on to the end of the main verb to give us a one-word future again, as in French j’aimerai “I will love”. So we’re back to where we started. Funny thing is in addition to this one-word future tense, called the futur simple, French also developed yet another future construction, the futur proche, with the auxiliary verb aller “to go”, as in je vais aimer “I will love”. The distinction between these two tenses was originally how distant a future you wanted to talk about: the futur proche was for the near future and the futur simple was for the more distant future, but today the distinction is really more one of formality, less formal for the futur simple and more formal for the futur proche. The even funnier thing is that the original Latin future amabo was itself originally created by having a form of the verb to be , which comes from Proto-Indo-European root *bheuə- “be, exist, grow” glued on the end of the present tense verb. And the word future itself, as we saw in the main video, also comes from the verb to be, from Latin futurus, which is the future participle of the verb to be which comes from the suffixed form of that same root, *bhu-tu-.

Now Latin had another set of futures. While first and second conjugation verbs had endings like amabo “I love” and amabit “she will love”, third and fourth conjugation verbs had endings like audiam “I shall hear” and audiet “she will hear”, which look a lot like the forms of the subjunctive mood, audiam “I may hear” and audiat “she may hear”. So again we see the future occupying the intersection of tense and modality. And getting back to the English modal auxiliary verbs will and shall, they can be used in their past tenses to indicate not only mood, as in I should go or I would go, but also to indicate future in the past, that is an action that is happens in the future relative to another action in the past, as in he knew he would win the race.

Now as we saw, French has a future tense formed with the auxiliary verb aller “to go”, and English can do this to, with the so-called go-future as in I’m going to love, often reduced down to I’m gonna love, or even I’ma, as in I’ma let you finish. This construction first appears in the Middle English period, and comes about through the idea of going somewhere for the purpose of doing an action, as in I’m going (in order) to hunt. So this construction originally implied purpose. Similar to this are constructions like he is to leave tomorrow, which uses the verb to be with the infinitive to indicate a planned action.

And speaking of the verb to be, in Old English there were two forms of the verb to be in the present tense, eom “I am”, eart “you are”, and is “she is”, or beo “I am”, bist “you are”, bið “she is”. Often these forms are interchangeable, but when the verb is referring to the future the beo/bist/bið forms are almost always used, and eom/eart/is forms are almost never used, so this can be a way of distinguishing the future tense from the present. The future of the verb to be is also sometimes indicated with another verb weorðan which really means “to become”. So he was, is, and will be can be expressed in Old English as he wæs, is, and bið, or as he wæs, is, and weorð. This futural usage might also remind one of modern German werden which can be used with the infinitive to form the future tense, as in ich werde haben “I will have”. One other specialized use of the beo/bist/bið forms is to indicate a gnomic statement, that is a statement of general truth without any indication of actual time, as in the sky is blue which in Old English would be seo lyft bið hæwenu. Interestingly, another way of making a gnomic statement in Old English is with *sculan “shall”, as in cyning sceal rice healdan “a king shall rule a kingdom”. The word gnomic by the way comes through Greek gnomikos from the Proto-Indo-European root *gno- meaning “know”, and gives us not only the words know and gnomic, but also the word gnomon which is the vertical shaft on a sundial which casts the shadow indicating the time.

And the sundial leads us to the history of clocks and timekeeping, which will be covered in an upcoming Endnote video, so stay tuned for that!

]]>Back to the FutureSchool notesMark SundaramMon, 04 Sep 2017 17:00:00 +0000http://www.alliterative.net/blog/2017/9/2/school-notes53b1a859e4b037526d8e159f:53bf2b11e4b0228b71b8ae4e:59ab0f8b8419c2a53cc176c3Since it’s back-to-school time, this week’s video is all about “Education”:

This video is part of a large collaboration with other members of the WeCreateEDU group, a collection of educational YouTubers. Do check out the full playlist of videos for a variety of takes on the theme of education.

We’ll be releasing two Endnote videos over the next few weeks with some more details that didn’t make it into the main video, so stay tuned for that. As a university teacher myself, I’ve unsurprisingly touched on the topic of education, both its history and its future, a number of times, so in a way I don’t have too much else to add here that wouldn’t just be repetition. So I’ll end off this blog post with a list of links, some my own and some that I recommend, if you want to go deeper into the topic. And I’d certainly welcome any further discussion on the topic. But first one last detail that I haven’t included elsewhere. In the video I mentioned that the Greek philosophers/teachers held their so-called peripatetic schools in a variety of public spaces, such as Plato in the grove of Akademos, hence the words academia and academic. Well, Aristotle’s school came to be known as the Lyceum (or Lykeion in Greek) because it was held at a grove near the temple of Apollo, who had the epithet Lykeios meaning “wolf-slayer” from lykos meaning "wolf" (think lycanthrope another word for werewolf). Because of this many educational institutions, often secondary schools, are called lyceums (or in French lycées).

Our video “Coach”, which touches on a number things about the history of education (and its current state)

One year ago my father passed away, leaving my mother a widow. As chance would have it, my father had always wanted me to cover the expression “grass widow” on my channel, and so this video is, in more ways than one, a reflection of him. My father was from India, but immigrated to Canada where he met my mother. So this this video also reflects that crucial period of Indian independence and partition that he grew up in. Furthermore, my father was also an avid golfer, so I think recounting the history of that game would also have pleased him. I’d also like to thank my sister for her help and input on the script.

There’s not to much else to add to this story. There are a few other small details that I’ll release soon in an endnote video, so stay tuned for that. For another detailed and fascinating story of widowhood in India, specifically as it relates to Bengali cuisine, have a look at this excellent post by Mayukh Sen.

In the video I quoted one British official about divide and rule policy in India, but that was hardly a unique point of view. Indeed that was a commonly repeated refrain, as the following additional quotations show:

“I am strongly of the opinion that Mussulmans should not be in the same company or troop with Hindus or Sikhs, and that the two latter should not be mingled together. I would maintain even in the same regiment all differences of faith with the greatest of care. There might be rivalry or even hatred between two companies or troops. The discipline of a native regiment instead of being impaired would gain by it, as regards the greater question of obedience to the commanding officer. The motto of the regimental commander and therefore of the commander-in-chief, must for the future be "Divide et Impera."” (Minute of Major-General Sir W. R. Mansfield)

William Rose Mansfield

“But suppose the whole native army to be formed into one grand army, the component parts of each regiment being as heterogeneous as possible, and suppose some cause of discontent to arise which affects all castes alike, the danger would be undoubtably far greater than that which overtook us last year. I have long considered this subject, and I am convinced that the exact converse of this policy of assimilation is our only safe military policy in India. Divide et impera was the old Roman motto, and it should be ours. The safety of the great iron steamers, which are adding so much to our military power, and which are probably destined to add still more to our commercial superiority, is greatly increased by building them in compartments. I would ensure the safety of our Indian Empire by constructing our native army on the same principle; for this purpose I would avail myself of those diversities of language and race which we find ready to hand.” (Lord Elphinstone)

“Keep the armies as separate as possible, as to tribes and grades in them. The system and organization may be the same; but I would rather have them distinct— "Divide et impera" - never let them assimilate if possible.” (Major-General John Hearsay)

So it was clearly a very conscious policy of divide and rule which laid the groundwork for the later divisiveness in India.And speaking of the administration of India, those two lexicographers Henry Yule and Arthur Coke Burnell, who wrote Hobson-Jobson, had both been involved in the government of the British Raj. After attending the East India Military College, Yule joined the Bengal Engineer Group and worked on various infrastructure projects. Both of his brothers also worked in India, one of them dying in the Sepoy Mutiny. As for Burnell, he had worked in Madras for the Indian Civil Service.

And a couple of final notes — you may have heard the claim that golf is an acronym “Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden”. As with all such claims of acronym etymologies before the 20th century, this simply isn’t true. There’s another interesting lawn sport connection with India, by the way. Badminton is said to have developed in British India. Though there were various racket and shuttlecock games around, badminton as we know it now seems to have been developed in the city Pune where there was a British garrison, and used to be called poona. It gained its current name from Badminton House, the name of the Gloucestershire estate of the Duke of Beaufort, where the game first was played in England, mid-19c., having been brought over from India by British officers. My father taught my sister and me to play badminton when we were kids, and he was also a great fan of tennis, so I think this connection to India also would have pleased him.

The New Game of Badminton in India

]]>From grass widows to lawn sportsThe Ingredients of a Good RecipeMark SundaramTue, 27 Jun 2017 12:00:00 +0000http://www.alliterative.net/blog/2017/6/20/the-ingredients-of-a-good-recipe53b1a859e4b037526d8e159f:53bf2b11e4b0228b71b8ae4e:594951f7440243a5fc748778This week’s video is part of the Recipe Project’s Virtual Conversation, and looks therefore at the word “Recipe”:

It was the origin and history of the word recipe itself that really led to the web of connections presented in the video. One recipe-related word we didn’t have time to include in the video is the word ingredient. It comes from the Latin verb ingredior meaning “to enter or go in”, and specifically is formed from the present participle, so literally “going in”. It’s first use in English is indeed to describe what goes into a recipe of the sweetened and spiced wine hippocras that I mentioned in connection to the word receipt. This first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is in a book of household practises and management called the Bok of Nurture by one John Russell: “Alle þese ingredyentes, þey ar for ypocras makynge.” In addition to explaining how to make hippocras, this 1250 line poetic manual explains such things as the duties of a butler, how to lay the table, how to carve meat, and so forth. So not exactly a recipe book, but an interesting document which records late medieval household practices around the middle of the 15th century.

Culinary recipes of course go back to ancient times. One of the most famous recipe books from the ancient world is the Apicius, a cookery book from the late 4th or early 5th century CE, and named after (though probably not actually written by) the famous Roman gourmand Marcus Gavius Apicius, who lived in the 1st century CE. One notable recipe detail we’ve discussed before in the video “Bug” (which discusses in large part the history of patents), is the apparent patenting of recipes in ancient Greece. The ancient Greek colony Sybaris, located in what is now Italy, was so financially successful that the citizens became known for their feasting and hedonism, so much so that even today the word sybaritic means “devoted to opulent luxury”. It’s perhaps not surprising then, that cooks in Sybaris were apparently granted exclusive rights to any culinary recipe they invented for a period of one year, at least according to the Greek writer Athenaeus. Even if this report isn’t true, that the idea of intellectual property could be conceived of in the ancient world is an interesting milestone. By way of comparison, today recipes can be copyrighted (not patented) but in order to be copyrighted they have to include more than just a list of ingredients but also the process (at least that’s my understanding of it). It’s also worth noting about recipes in the ancient world that Galen, that most important of Roman physicians, who was the main source of medical knowledge in the middle ages, also wrote about food in something resembling a recipe book, as did several other Roman physicians, according to Athenaeus. In terms of Galen’s views on the humours, he believed that blood was the most dominant of the humours and thus most needed to be controlled, hence his recommendation of leeching.

The Apicius manuscript

Marcus Gavius Apicius

As we mentioned in the video, the notion of bodily humours is not unique to ancient Greece and the medical traditions that stem from it. Most notably Ayurveda, the traditional system of medicine from India, recommends the balance of three doshas (or humours) in order to maintain health. And similar to the ancient Greek humoural system, these doshas are also associated with the elements (earth, air, fire, water, and ether). Unlike the now obsolete humoural system in Europe, however, a considerable percentage of the population in India still practise some form of Ayurvedic medicine.

Ayurveda humours

And finally we come to the women’s magazines which we ended the video with as well. If you’re interested in knowing more about this history, we highly recommend the Guardian article “Zeal and Softness” by Kathryn Hughes, which goes into much more detail. We particularly traced the progress of British women’s magazines, but of course there were other notable women’s magazines in the English-speaking world. In the US, the premiere magazine was Godey’s Lady’s Book. Though still published by a man, Louis Godey, it was edited by the highly influential Sarah Josepha Hale. Hale, who also wrote the children’s song "Mary Had a Little Lamb" (which by the way has the honour of being the first recording made on Thomas Edison’s phonograph), was responsible for promoting the US Thanksgiving tradition, and popularizing the Christmas tree in America. Hale was also very politically minded, at a time when the country was threatened by civil war. Her appeal to President Lincoln to create Thanksgiving as a national holiday was in part motivated by a desire to create a unifying American tradition. She also used Godey’s Lady’s Book as a platform for promoting national unity, even though the publisher, Godey, was against putting any overt political material into the magaizine. For instance, in her fiction she often wrote stories of romances between northerners and southerners, all with nice happy endings. For more on Hale’s efforts to stop the US Civil War, see this JSTOR post by Erin Blakemore. But in these (at the time) bold efforts we perhaps can see something of Teen Vogue’s current political statements in the turbulent US politics of today, a trend we can for instance see demonstrated in this Teen Vogue article and frequently commented on in other news outlets (such as here and here).

Godey's Lady's Book

Sarah Josepha Hale

]]>The Ingredients of a Good RecipeA Closer Eye on the PotatoMark SundaramFri, 16 Jun 2017 14:35:41 +0000http://www.alliterative.net/blog/2017/6/13/a-closer-eye-on-the-potato53b1a859e4b037526d8e159f:53bf2b11e4b0228b71b8ae4e:59402b31e58c62e16b8e6e72This week’s video is part of a larger collaboration looking at the potato, and in particular at the potato battery:

The video begins with the potato battery and specifically Alessandro Volta’s pile, the world’s first battery. But it could also be argued that another invention of Volta lies behind the video’s ending point with the potato cannon. He invented a glass pistol-like device which used an electric spark to ignite flammable gas. It came about from a device called the eudiometer designed by Joseph Preistley for testing the quality of the air, in other words its oxygen content. Volta’s pistol version made the device more portable, and Volta used it to ignite swamp gas, what we know now as methane. When the gas in the glass pistol ignited it blew a cork out of the end, so basically a cork gun or pop gun. This principle of expanding gasses firing a projectile also lies behind the potato cannon. As a side note, the scientist who worked out the role of oxygen in combustion was Antoine Lavoisier, also influenced by Priestley’s work with flammable air, who also happens to have been one of the notable figures invited to potato PR man Parmentier’s potato dinner.

Volta's electric pistol

But getting back to Volta’s pile, though in English the word pile has been commonly replaced by that word battery, in French a battery can still be called a pile. In English a battery is also referred to as a cell. Cell comes from the Latin word cella meaning a "small room", and by way of analogy to the monastic cells, the small rooms in which monks lived in medieval monasteries, other concepts came to be referred to as cells, including biological cells, brain cells, and battery cells, essentially compartments that contain the anode and cathode suspended in the acidic electrolyte. So the term battery cell contains two metaphors, artillery and the medieval monastery. By the way if you’re interested in hearing more about the semantic development of the word cell and cellular, have a listen to the Words for Granted podcast episode on the word cellular.

Now as I said in the video, Volta was inspired to create the battery because of Galvani’s experiments with “animal electricity”. Well, experiments in galvanism was also one of the inspirations behind Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. Those experiments in making animal muscles twitch using electricity suggested the notion of bringing a creature back to life, like the monster in Shelley’s book. And that brings us back to the potato-powered industrial revolution, because one of the ways Frankenstein is interpreted is as a response to industrialization. Romantic writers like Mary Shelley were often critical of the industrial revolution. You see they were great nature lovers and were therefore somewhat suspicious of the way industrialization and urbanization were transforming the countryside of Europe. Furthermore, industrialization was seen as a perversion of the natural order, figured in the novel as Victor Frankenstein meddling with the natural forces of creation. And finally there was the worry that the industrial worker would be dehumanized or even replaced by scientific contrivances.

Frankenstein creates his monster

The Industrial Revolution

In light of the rapid transformation of the western world through industrialization these fears are not surprising. But the novel Frankenstein still resonates today, only the way we apply its warnings is somewhat different. Today we fear the rapid development of genetically modified foods, which we sometimes term Frankenfoods in reference to the novel. Well, each era has its own preoccupations and fears about rapid progress. We can take this back to the potato, one such genetically modified organism, varieties of which have been designed so as not to bruise and become discoloured. There are even potatoes being developed that are resistant to the potato blight disease which led to the terrible Irish famine in the 1840s.

In the video I described how the global tuber trade led to the mixing up of two similar vegetables the potato and the sweet potato. Well there’s another tuber that similarly gets thrown into the mix, the yam. Properly speaking a yam is an African derived tuberous vegetable in the genus Dioscorea, but in some parts of North America the word yam is sometimes applied to the unrelated sweet potato. The word yam, by the way, comes through Portuguese inhame, ultimately from a West African root which means “to eat” (compare Fulani nyami “to eat”).

yams

The spread of potatoes is just one example of the globalization of food, which I’ve touched on a number of times before, including the video and blog post on “Turkey” and more recently in our podcast episode on condiments. For Europe this globalization of food, and in particular the potato, allowed for the escape from the so-called Malthusian trap, the idea that population growth and a rising standard of living could not continue unabated due to lack of resources, which are finite. In other words population growth should outstrip the resources leading to shortage and starvation. But the agricultural revolution that was made possible in part due to the potato, along with the accompanying industrial revolution, took the limits off that resource growth and allowed it to keep up with the population boom, and our various technological advances, including things like artificial fertilizers and now genetically modified crops, allows us to continue to stay ahead of the Malthusian trap—for now.

Thomas Malthus

But if all this talk of potato based revolutions is becoming too serious, we can remind ourselves of the fun side of potatoes, not only with potato batteries and potato cannons, but also toys such as the spud gun, a kind of mini version of the potato cannon which uses compressed air to fire off small chunks of potato from a pistol reminiscent of Volta’s electric pistol. The spud gun was surprisingly invented during the Great Depression, when you’d think they’d have thought better of wasting food in that way. But the most famous potato-based toy is of course Mr Potato Head, which was originally designed to use an actual potato as the head, before this was replaced with a plastic potato-shaped base. Surprisingly it too was invented during the 1940s, around the time of food shortages, caused by World War II and its rationing. And anyways, don’t parents always say not to play with our food?

spud gun

Mr Potato Head

And I’ll leave you on one last light-hearted potato note, the welcome potato. This photoshopped image was supposedly a demonstration of the dangers of careless use of Google translate in a sign designed to welcome the Pope. You see the word papa in Spanish can mean "potato" (borrowed from the Quechua word for the vegetable as I pointed out in the video), but it can also refer to the Pope as a kind of word for father (as in holy father). Although this was a photoshop job and not an actual Google translate error, the image became a popular meme. But I’ll leave it to you to decide how welcome the potato is to world history.

If you want to watch more about potato science, check out this playlist for experiments with potato batteries, potato cannons, potato chip psychology & more!

]]>A Closer Eye on the PotatoFishhooks and Swords: the Anglo-Saxon FoundationsMark SundaramWed, 24 May 2017 21:35:49 +0000http://www.alliterative.net/blog/2017/5/23/fishhooks-and-swords53b1a859e4b037526d8e159f:53bf2b11e4b0228b71b8ae4e:5924809b15d5db55039cebddThis week we have a double bill of Anglo-Saxon videos! First, on my channel there's a video about the foundations of the English language, as I look at "What’s the Earliest English word?" Then over on Jabzy’s channel, a collaboration between us on the "Anglo-Saxon Invasion".

One of the challenges of putting together a coherent narrative of the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain is balancing the literary historical sources and the archaeological evidence. In broad outline these sources of information are in agreement but there are some inconsistencies. One of the things we just couldn’t include in the narrative of the Anglo-Saxon settlement was a historiographical account of the literary sources, and so I’ll outline a very basic explanation of the sources here. One of our earliest written sources that discusses the Germanic peoples is the Roman writer Tacitus in his book Germania, written around the year 98. Since his approach is ethnographic we might be tempted to take his evidence at face value. However, it should be remembered that Tacitus may have an ulterior motive in his text, criticizing the corruption he saw in his own Roman society and thus making out the Germans to be a sort of “noble savage” people. Also, we don’t really know where Tacitus got his information from. That being said, he does seem to mention the Angles, as well as the Frisians (along with many other Germanic tribes).

Our earliest detailed account of the Anglo-Saxon arrival in Britain is Gildas's The Ruin of Britain. Gildas was a Celtic monk writing perhaps some 100 years after the invasion, and it should be remembered that his text is not a history, but a religious polemic that paints the coming of the Saxons as a divine retribution for the sins of the Britons, so again, he too has an ulterior motive. Gildas refers exclusively to the Saxons, which seems to have been a generic term for the various north Germanic peoples. In fact Saxon appears to be not an ethnic distinction, but a confederacy of various Germanic tribes. The name Saxon, by the way, seems to come from their favourite weapon, the seax, a kind of sword or dagger, a word which appears to be related to the word section, from the idea of cutting or dividing. So with the Angles being named after their fishhook-shaped homeland, the Anglo-Saxons are literally the fishhooks and swords!

A seax and a reconstructed replica

Bede, an Anglo-Saxon writing nearly 200 years later, bases his account of the invasion in The Ecclesiastical History of the English People heavily on Gildas, though he may well have had other sources as well. Bede was a careful historian, who was clearly striving for accuracy, and he does his best with the limited information he had to establish a consistent chronology of events as he knew them. Of course Bede was specifically concerned with ecclesiastical history, that is the history of the church in England, so this can also be seen to colour his depiction of the events. He specifically names three groups of people arriving, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, and tells us where they they made their new homes, the Jutes in Kent and the Isle of Wight, the Saxons in Essex, Sussex, and Wessex (literally the East Saxons, South Saxons, and West Saxons), and the Angles in East Anglia, Mercia, and Northumbria. The West Saxons are also at times referred to as the Gewisse. Bede also reports that the ancestral area of the Angles remained empty after they left, and there does seem to be archaeological evidence of this area being deserted ca. 450 due to rising sea levels. As for the Jutes, the obvious place of origin for them would be the Jutland peninsula, north of the Angles, but it’s assumed that the languages spoken in that region were probably north Germanic, more closely related to Old Norse, rather than the Anglo-Saxon dialects. This is a bit of a linguistic puzzle. One suggestion is that the Jutes who came to Kent stopped over for a time with the Franks, and so represented something of a hybrid group. This would make sense as the archaeological finds in Kent are kind of Frankish in nature. There’s also been some attempts to connect the Jutes with the Geats, Beowulf’s people in great Old English epic poem Beowulf.

Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People (St Petersburg manuscript)

Beowulf manuscript

There are also some minor sources from early on of the Anglo-Saxon arrival. Procopius, a Byzantine historian writing around the same time as Gildas in the 6th century, reports that Britain was comprised of three races, the Angles, Frisians, and Britons. This would make good linguistic sense, as Frisian is linguistically the closest Germanic dialect to Old English. Another minor source, the Gallic Chronicle, for the year 441 mentions Saxon invaders. The reality is likely that it was multi-ethnic groups that settled in Britain, and that the divisions weren’t as clear-cut as Bede makes them out to be, but in any case the archaeological evidence does more or less support this picture.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles are a rather late source, dating from around the time of King Alfred the Great (in fact probably a royally appointed endeavour, and you can imagine how foundation stories would be useful to a king with country-unifying ambitions), but possibly drawing on sources of information now lost. The Chronicles provide a rather detailed account of the progress of the various Germanic invaders as they penetrated more and more of the Celtic Britons’ lands. Most of the detailed info in the video is drawn from this source. In addition to the West Saxon foundation story of Cerdic and Cynric mentioned in the video, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles also mentions two other West Saxon foundation stories, Port and his two sons Bieda and Mægla arriving in Portsmouth in 501, and more West Saxons including Stuf and Wihtgar arriving in 514. Many of these accounts may be rationalizations attempting to explain placenames, such as Port in Portsmouth. And indeed Cerdic’s name is suspiciously Celtic sounding. Certainly the precision of the annalistic dates given in the Chronicles is suspect. Nevertheless the Chronicles are our best evidence for the progress of the Anglo-Saxon invasion.

The Peterborough Chronicle

King Alfred the Great

And that brings me to an issue I’ve been dancing around until now. Are we talking about an invasion of a small number of elite warriors or a large-scale migration? This is a hotly debated question, and one I don’t intend to try to answer here. Archaeological evidence suggest a slow process, one way or the other, with more Saxon burials found in the south and the midlands, and Anglo-Saxon rule north of the Themes only in the 6th century (which is consistent with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles). The increasing number of grave sites over time suggests continued immigration throughout the 5th and 6th centuries. We also have placename evidence such as placenames ending in -ingas, like Hastings, commemorating followers of someone named Hæsta. And we can work backwards from the Norman Conquest in 1066 and the subsequent great census known as the Doomsday Book compiled in 1086, which suggests that by then England contained less than half its late Roman population. That would suggest substantial depopulation during the Anglo-Saxon period. Most recently we have genetic evidence. There have been multiple genetic studies of the current population of England to determine the degree of Germanic settlement. The results of these studies are contentious and uncertain, but perhaps suggest only a small Germanic impact on the genetic heritage of England.

One of the most famous events of the Anglo-Saxon invasion is the Battle of Mount Badon. Gildas tells us that the Britons were led by Ambrosius Aurelianus, whom Gildas identifies as the last of the Romans in Britain whose parents had “worn the purple” (however you wish to take that). Some have identified Ambrosius Aurelianus as the inspiration for the figure of King Arthur, or made connections between him and another proto-Arthur figure Riothamus, said to have been king of Britons in Gaul. But we don’t really know when or where this battle was fought. Gildas dates it to the year of his birth, 44 years before he wrote his account. Bede dates it to ca. 493 and the Annales Cambriae to 517. A later Welsh writer Nennius, writing in the 9th century, explicitly connects Arthur to the Battle of Mount Badon; his account of these events is very much tinged with romance. And speaking of the Welsh, by the way, it should be pointed out that the word Welsh is itself an English word, from Old English wealh meaning “foreigner”. In Welsh, Wales is called Cymru. So the takeaway from this whole story, I suppose, is that the Britons were eventually made to be foreigners in their own country.

A few final words about Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons. As I said in the “What’s the Earliest English Word” video, our manuscript evidence for Old English is all relatively late, from the 9th to the 11th century, but we have various artifacts with earlier Old English inscriptions. One such artifact I didn’t mention is the Ruthwell Cross, a large stone cross located in Ruthwell in what is now Scotland. It has inscribed on it in runes a part of a poem of which we have a later manuscript copy known as the Dream of the Rood. It dates from around the same time as the Franks Casket, the early 8th century, though I’m assuming possibly a little later, from what I can tell. I won’t really get into the dating of the poem Beowulf, possibly ranging from the early 8th century to as late as the 11th century, contentious an issue as it is. Of course some have argued that it existed in some oral form earlier than the 8th century, but that’s a discussion for another time.

The Ruthwell Cross

close-up of the Ruthwell Cross

And one last sideline. We saw in the earliest word video a running theme of the foundations of Anglo-Saxon England, as well as an interesting parallel with the foundation story of Rome with Romulus and Remus being suckled by the she-wolf, pictured on both the Franks Casket and the Undley Bracteate. Well if you’re therefore wondering what the earliest Latin word is, we seem to have the answer in an inscription on a Roman artifact called the Praeneste fibula. The inscription reads: “MANIOS MED FHEFHAKED NVMASIOI” meaning “Manius made me for Numerius”. A fibula, by the way, is a safetypin-like brooch for fastening garments. The word fibula is now also used to refer to one of the bones in the lower part of the leg running from the knee to the ankle, and forming part of the ankle joint, because of its resemblance to the brooch. But this might remind us of the astragalus ankle bone that has raihan “roe deer” inscribed on it, one of the candidates for the earliest English word.

The Praeneste fibula

]]>Fishhooks and Swords: the Anglo-Saxon FoundationsVermouth, Campari, and the Americano WaycocktailMark SundaramMon, 24 Apr 2017 13:00:00 +0000http://www.alliterative.net/blog/2017/4/23/vermouth-campari-and-the-americano-way53b1a859e4b037526d8e159f:53bf2b11e4b0228b71b8ae4e:58fd29cff7e0ab0af46e910aIn this month’s video we have a look at the Americano cocktail:

The word Americano in reference to the cocktail first appears in print in the 1928 book Ashenden: Or the British Agent written by Somerset Maugham: “He sat in the cool and drank an americano.” Cocktails often have a connection with secret agents (think James Bond’s vodka martini, shaken not stirred), and this novel fits into that mould. It’s the story of the adventures of a playwright-turned-spy named Ashenden set during WWI. Apparently it’s based on Maugham’s own experiences as a member of British Intelligence during the war, just as Ian Fleming drew on his WWII experiences for James Bond. Speaking of James Bond, the very first drink he orders in the very first James Bond novel, Casino Royal, is the Americano, so it certainly has its spy pedigree. In other Bond stories we find the famous super spy drinking a Negroni, so 007’s drink tastes certainly extended beyond his now-trademark martinis.

Somerset Maugham

Ian Fleming

Although the caffè americano is supposedly connected with WWII, it doesn’t find its way into print in English until a 1964 issue of the Sunday Gleaner of Kingston, Jamaica: “Cafe Americano or cafe Latino? The first is what it says. Mild American-style coffee.” The Oxford English Dictionary reports the phrase café americano being used in Central American Spanish at least as early as 1955. As for the Negroni, as I mentioned in the video, it was first used in print quoting Orson Welles: “Orson Welles, working in ‘Cagliostro’ in Rome, writes that he's discovered a new drink there—Negronis. It's made of gin, Italian vermouth and Campari bitters. ‘The bitters are excellent for your liver, the gin is bad for you. They balance each other.’” Shortly thereafter, Ernest Hemingway used the word Negroni to refer to something that sounds an awful lot like an Americano instead: “They were drinking negronis, a combination of two sweet vermouths and seltzer water” (Across the river and into the trees, 1950). By the way, there’s a Negroni week to celebrate the cocktail and it’s history. This year (2017) it falls on the 5th to the 11th of June, so mark you calendars and raise a glass to Count Negroni, whoever he is. Here’s a picture of bartenders dressed as “Count Negroni” mixing a giant cocktail.

As for the invention of vermouth, the other main ingredient in the Americano, fortified wines containing wormwood seem to go back thousands of years, but the best claim for the invention of the modern vermouth as we know it goes to Antonio Benedetto Carpano, who introduced the drink in 1786 as a sweet liqueur more suitable for ladies. The Carpano distillery also invented Punt e Mes, used in the original Americano.

Antonio Benedetto Carpano

Vermouth and Campari are both classified as types of amaro, “bitter” in Italian. That word amaro comes from Latin amarus, which may come from the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root *om- meaning “raw, sharp-tasting”. The word amaro has as cognates two other liqueurs, amaretto and maraschino.

The etymology for America given in the video is by far the most widely accepted one, but there is an alternate suggestion that the Americas were not named in honour of Amerigo Vespucci, but after a man named Richard Amerike. According to this claim, Richard Amerike, an Anglo-Welsh merchant, royal customs officer, and sheriff of Bristol, was a backer of John Cabot’s expedition to the “new world”, which was subsequently named after him in gratitude for this sponsorship. The problem is there isn’t really any evidence for any of this, and so few have taken up the theory. By the way, his last name Amerike is an anglicised spelling of the Welsh ap Meurig meaning “son of Meurig”, which is the Welsh form of the name Maurice, which comes from the Latin name Maurus. This in turn may be related to Greek mauros “dark” and/or to Moor, in other words inhabitant of Mauritania. But lest we lose our connection to the PIE *reg- root, Amerike’s first name, Richard, is made up of the elements ric “ruler” and harthu “hard”, so literally “hard or powerful ruler”.

And speaking of that root, and the Taler or Joachimsthaler coin, the other countries that picked up the coin also added that ric element to the name, not only the Holy Roman Reichsthaler, but also the Dutch rijksdaalder, the Danish rigsdaler, and the Swedish riksdaler. All of these names mean essentially “national dollar”. As for the American dollar, it’s colloquially known as the buck which is an abbreviation of buckskin, a common unit of exchange between Native Americans and Europeans in the early frontier days of North America.

]]>Vermouth, Campari, and the Americano WayThe Creation of CreateMark SundaramMon, 20 Mar 2017 04:01:00 +0000http://www.alliterative.net/blog/2017/3/19/the-creation-of-create53b1a859e4b037526d8e159f:53bf2b11e4b0228b71b8ae4e:58ceb96f5016e12230845820This month’s video, part of the #CreateICG collaboration, is all about the word “Create”:

The spark of the idea of course came from those two base senses of the roots of the word create, “to grow” and “to cause to grow” or thus “to create”, both stemming from the Proto-Indo-European root *ker- “to grow”. This seemed to be an apt way of thinking about the creative process, as both an active act of intentional creation and an organic process of growing. As we briefly touched on in the video, this etymology also brought up the related word creature, obviously meaning in its base sense “created thing”, which got us wondering if it was as a consequence of the novel Frankenstein and the movies it spawned that creature could be used in the sense of “monster”, especially under the influence of the phrase creature feature. Most of the dictionaries I checked didn’t list this sense, though the phrase creature feature is sometimes mentioned, and there is the sense of “a being of anomalous or uncertain aspect or nature” referring to creatures of fantasy or creatures from outer space. We did a quick Twitter poll and found that in British English the word creature was certainly not strongly associated with the meaning “monster”, with many citing the phrase “all creatures great and small” as a particular influence (as well as the TV series Creature Comforts) , but the results, though still negative were somewhat more mixed in North American and world English. So it would seem we might need to do a little more digging here. If you have any thoughts we’d be grateful to read them in the comments below.

Another possible word in the *ker- family might be sincere, though this has an uncertain etymology. Latin sincerus has the sense “clean, pure, sound”, and one suggestion for its etymology is that the first element is from Proto-Indo-European *sem- meaning “one” (also giving us the word same) and the second element is from *ker- thus giving us literally “one growth”, which would seem to make sense. Another suggestion, though rejected by the OED, is that it comes from Latin sine “without” and cera “wax”. But it’s appropriate enough that we bring the word sincere up in a discussion of creation, especially in light of the expression “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”. Indeed imitation and influence are essential parts of the creative process. As we say in the video, no one creates in a vacuum, ourselves included. So perhaps we should acknowledge here our own creative indebtedness to sources and influences, which are listed on the sources page. In particular, as is often the case, I took inspiration James Burke, famous for his Connections series and book, especially for the story of the development of artificial lighting technology (and its connection to the theatrical world) and for John Harvey Kellogg’s transformation of breakfast.

And speaking of connections, Mary Somerville’s great work On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences was an attempt to present a connected view of the sciences as they were known at the time, an ambitious and immediately highly celebrated work. As it happens, John Herschel, son of William, had just recently called for such work in a letter to William Whewell, who went on to review Somerville’s bestseller. Herschel stressed the need for “digests of what is actually known in each particular branch of science ... to give a connected view of what has been done, and what remains to be accomplished”. Four years later, Somerville’s book was published, coincidentally enough under the publisher John Murray who was also publisher and friend of Lord Byron, the father of Somerville’s student Ada Lovelace. You can read an excellent outline of Somerville and On the Connexion of the Physical Scienceshere if you want more information on the first “scientist”.

John Herschel

John Murray

Somerville herself was well connected and knew many other great minds of the day, such as William Herschel, Michael Faraday, Charles Babbage, Charles Lyell, Georges Cuvier, Humphry Davy, and John Playfair. On the subject of connected people, there’s another chain of connections that ties Joseph Haydn, composer of the oratorio The Creation, in with John Harvey Kellogg and his cornflakes. You see the libretto of The Creation mentioned in the video, either written by or passed along by Thomas Linley to Haydn, was the first English text of the oratorio, and is now lost. A second (and by all accounts much improved) English text was written by poet Anne Home. Home’s husband was one John Hunter, a surgeon who was in part responsible for bringing the scientific method into medicine. Hunter was a teacher of the famous Edward Jenner, who pioneered vaccination by using the less deadly cowpox to inoculate against smallpox, one of the most important contributions to medical science. The idea of inoculation against smallpox was initially brought into England from Turkey by aristocrat, writer, and all around celebrity Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. She is perhaps most famous for her Embassy Letters, written while in Turkey as an ambassador’s wife. Lord Byron was deeply influenced by the Embassy Letters and seems to have been kind of obsessed with Lady Montagu herself, a woman who died well before he was born. Of course as the video demonstrates, Byron’s daughter was Ada Lovelace, mathematician and the world’s first computer programmer, who got harpist John Thomas into the Royal Academy of Music, who later taught Nansi Richards, who gave John Harvey Kellogg the idea for the cornflakes rooster mascot. So from creation to cereal, two words etymologically connected, in ten easy steps! Speaking of Kellogg, by the way, though Richards was punning on his name in Welsh, his actual name doesn’t mean rooster but is literally “kill hog”, an occupational name for a butcher. Odd name for a man who prescribed a bland vegetarian diet!

Anne Home

John Hunter

Edward Jenner

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Lord Byron

But getting back to Ada Lovelace’s tutor Somerville, and her admiring reviewer Whewell, in addition to inventing the term “scientist” Whewell was quite a coiner of scientific terminology, including a number of terms suggested to Michael Faraday for his work on electricity, such as ion, anode, and cathode. By the way, Faraday was another among the many admirers of Somerville and her work. And Faraday brings us back to artificial lighting, so a small footnote or two on lighting technology—which does also tie into Somerville’s work too, as well to Haydn’s Creation. Of course Somerville included several sections on light and optics in On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. Additionally that very same John Herschel, who called for a book like Somerville’s and whose father William (who was also a composer as well as a scientist) met Haydn, reported on the effectiveness of Thomas Drummond’s limelight. Drummond, by the way, after putting limelight to good use in surveying work, tried to get his invention into lighthouses, before it was taken up by the theatrical world. And one lighting technology I didn’t cover in the video deserves a brief mention here. Kerosene (a petroleum product) was invented by Canadian geologist Abraham Gesner, and became a useful lamp fuel still used today. The word kerosene, which Gesner registered as a trademark in 1854 before it ultimately became genericized, comes from Greek keros meaning “wax”, related to that Latin word cera in that possible though unlikely etymology of the word sincere. Kerosene, by the way, is also sometimes referred to as paraffin, a word originally coined by German chemist Karl von Reichenbach in 1838 to refer to the waxy substance he extracted from wood tar, the very same waterproofer for ships that Archibald Crane was trying to replace with his coal tar. The word paraffin comes from Latin parum “not very, too little” and affinis “associated with”, because the substance was not closely related to other chemicals.

Abraham Gesner

Karl von Reichenbach

And a small footnote or two on meal terminology. As briefly mentioned in the video, the word lunch is probably related to lump. The word lunch was initially expanded to the form luncheon, before being abbreviated back to lunch, though there may also be some influence from the Spanish word lonja meaning “a slice (of ham)”. Another meal word worth noting is supper, which is sometimes used to refer to the last meal of the day. It comes into English from the Old French verb soper “to eat the evening meal” but comes ultimately from a Germanic root, which also gives us the words sip, sop, soup, and sup, so I suppose etymologically speaking you should sup your supper by sipping your soup and sopping it up! As for breakfast, French shows the same shifting mealtimes, with the word dejeuner (coming from the same root that gives English the word dinner) originally referring to “breakfast” and then “lunch”, with the phrase petit dejeuner (literally “small dinner”) being used to refer to “breakfast”.

And one final point to round off this blog. I briefly mentioned the etymology of chaos in the video, but I give a fuller treatment of it in the video on “Linoleum” if you care to give it a look. Our modern sense of chaos meaning “disorder” doesn’t arise until the 17th century. The word chaos stretches back through ancient Greek to a Proto-Indo-European root *gheu- meaning “to gape, yawn” which also leads to the word Ginungagap, the primordial void in the Norse creation myth. And speaking of Norse mythology, it also has something to tell us about the nature of creativity, in the story of the Mead of Creation, which you can hear about in our accompanying podcast (being released soon), which along with this blog post and video makes up our creative contributions to the #CreateICG collaboration. Give it a listen!

]]>The Creation of CreateThe Evolution of EvolutionMark SundaramFri, 24 Feb 2017 21:21:46 +0000http://www.alliterative.net/blog/2017/2/13/the-evolution-of-evolution53b1a859e4b037526d8e159f:53bf2b11e4b0228b71b8ae4e:58a22c35be6594d7b42710bcThis month’s video looks at why and how the meanings of words evolve, and how this is connected to the word evolution and the history of the book:

If you’re interested in even more discussion of semantic shift have a look at The Ling Space’s video “Sense and Shiftability” and the episode “Polysemous Words” from the podcast Words for Granted. By the way, another term you might come across in reference to weakening is semantic bleaching — it’s a particularly evocative one, isn’t it. Another type of figurative change in meaning is synecdoche. That’s when a part stands in for the whole. So when a ship’s captain calls for “all hands on deck”, the word hands has taken on the new meaning of referring to the sailors themselves. Similar to this is when one uses the name of a capital city, such as Washington, to refer to the whole country or the whole government of that country. An interesting example of synecdoche in which the new meaning has taken over as the primary meaning is the word table, which in Old French meant “board”, but now refers, in both French and English, to the entire piece of furniture including board and legs.

As for the word evolution, in the video I summarized pretty briefly its semantic development, but a closer look at this will prove interesting. The first recorded sense of evolution in English is actually in reference to a military manoeuvre, in the early 17th century. Then we have some literal uses of the word to refer to various types of turning movements as in dancing, gymnastics, and even machine parts. From the 17th century we also see the word used in the more figurative sense of a progression of a series of events, like the unfolding or unrolling of history. From the late 17th century we also see the word used in a variety of mathematical senses, such as the opening out of a curve and the extraction of a root from a given power. Skipping forward, after the word has come to have its modern biological Darwinian sense, it comes also to be used in other scientific contexts from the mid 19th century, such as the development of the Earth or the Universe. But as I mentioned in the video, Darwin mostly avoided using the term himself, in part perhaps because of the notion of a simple unfolding or revelation of history, which might have invoked a more creationist notion of natural history, and also probably because it had previously been used in reference to other theories of biological development, such as preformationism in which organisms were thought to develop from miniature versions of themselves:

As I mentioned in a previous video on Charles’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin, the senior Darwin also used the word evolution in reference to his own proto-evolutionary theories. So Charles himself used other terms such as transmutation and descent with modification, only using the word once (specifically in its verb form) in the final sentence of Origin of Species: “From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” For more on the chain of events that leads up to Darwin's theory of evolution, you can have a look at our video "Fossil".

And finally the history of the book. I got the idea of book sizes and sheep from an excellent blog post from Got Medieval. It fitted in well not only with the development of parchment to paper, but also with the general theme of the evolution and also repurposing of technology, with the carry over of book sizes all the way to ereaders. By the way, though the distinction is often made between parchment coming from sheep and vellum from cows, it should be pointed out that this distinction doesn’t always hold, and the terms are sometimes used interchangeably. As for the word folio, when we talk about foliation in medieval manuscripts, it’s customary not to number the pages as we do with modern books, but to number the leaves, referring to the front and back of each leaf as recto and verso respectively, literally meaning the “right” side and the “turned” side. The pages in medieval manuscripts were not originally numbered so this convention is a modern scholarly convenience, and this is an important point, as we’ll see in a minute.

And in the video, though I implied the importance of technological development in book technology, it’s worth taking the time here to discuss it more explicitly. The benefit of the scroll over the clay tablet is fairly obvious, as the thin rolled up papyrus can include far more text in the same amount of space, a higher information density you might say. What’s not so obvious perhaps is the leap ahead that the move to the codex affords. (By the way a quick sidenote: it’s frequently reported that Julius Caesar was responsible for the invention of the codex, though I haven’t been able to verify this story). With a scroll, the text is available in a purely linear order. You literally have to “scroll” through the text, making it difficult to go back to a previous passage in the text. But the codex allows for random access and it is perhaps not too much of an overstatement to suggest that this plays an important role in the explosion of information that has accelerated technical scientific progress. So it’s something of a feedback loop with technological progress accelerating the pace of the progress of technological progress. It’s funny that in a way we’ve taken a step backward to some extent with ereaders, which are somewhat more clumsy at flipping through the text, and we’re once again “scrolling” through a book. And with the switch to paper that’s much cheaper than parchment and the printing press, which caused in the 15th century it’s own information explosion (with more books being printed in the first 50 years than had been produced in the 1000 years before the printing press). By the way, uppercase and lowercase are also terms derived from movable type, like font, referring literally to cases in which the letters were kept in. But back to the codex, the other big advantage is that it allows for an index, since page divisions give us distinct reference points. Though, as I said, the pages weren’t originally numbered--that practise didn’t really take off until the early 16th century, and so indexes got their start toward the end of the 16th century. Also during the 16th century we find the invention of the bibliography, with Conrad Gesner’s Bibliotheca universalis, a bibliographic index of all the books Gesner could get his hands on.

The word index, by the way, as you might have guessed, is the same word as the index finger, and comes from the Latin verb indicare “to point out” — makes sense, right? And in Latin, the word index could refer not only to the finger but also to anything that points something out, like a sign or token, or a person who betrays a secret, in other words an informer, and appropriately to our discussion here it was also the word for the title of a book. In any case, all this 16th century pagination and indexing points out another problem with the modern ebook, that there’s no consistent pagination, as the screen and font sizes are potentially variable. You might for instance be reading on an ereader like a Kindle or a much smaller phone or a varying size of tablet (which by the way is related to the word table from earlier, literally a "little table" but in the earlier sense of a "board" without the table legs). On the other hand, the new technology gives us the compensatory function of a full search of all the text in the ebook. And indeed we can certainly make the case that, like the development of the codex, paper, the printing press, and the index, the move to electronic text has caused a similar explosion in information and innovation in our modern world.

Update:

A friend of mine and fellow medievalist has informed me that a couple of elements in the video are in fact myths about the history of the book (though seemingly quite widespread ones). First, parchment wasn’t in fact invented in Pergamon. For instance, the earliest known Egyptian use of parchment is from the 20th Dynasty (1195-1085 BCE). The widely reported story goes that parchment was developed in Pergamon when Ptolemy refused to export Egyptian papyrus to Pergamon. This belief seems to have developed from the fact that Pergamon was a major producer of parchment (but not in fact its originator). Most of the etymological sources I checked repeat the myth, though occasionally with hedging language like “was said to have originated” or “supposedly”. Surprisingly, Wikipedia seems to be the one place that gets it exactly right!

Secondly, there seems to be no evidence of the folding method to produce book sizes earlier than paper books, so it wouldn’t therefore be connected with parchment and sheep. As my friend points out, it doesn’t make a lot of sense with parchment anyway, since it would be very difficult to fold. The source for the idea that book sizes are connected to sheep sizes is a post on the blog Got Medieval, written by a medievalist who works with manuscript images, so seemingly a reliable source, but it’s been widely reported in places such as Wired and Neatorama. If anyone has any more information about this, I’d love to hear it.

]]>The Evolution of EvolutionNaughty and NiceMark SundaramFri, 16 Dec 2016 15:48:33 +0000http://www.alliterative.net/blog/2016/12/13/naughty-and-nice53b1a859e4b037526d8e159f:53bf2b11e4b0228b71b8ae4e:585044e3e6f2e1014721555cHappy holidays! This year’s Christmas video is all about the tradition of the Christmas stocking and the treats you get in it:

The main theme here, using the sugar coating metaphor, is to uncover the true and often unsavoury stories behind some Christmas traditions. First of all there’s St Nicholas, a rather stern figure originally, at times associated as much with punishment as reward, like the switch left in the shoe (or stocking) for punishing bad children — he knows when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake! The punishment element of it all is further emphasized through the etymological connection between stocking and the stocks. There’s also the grisly story of the butchered and pickled young boys that Nicholas brought back to life. Not surprising perhaps that this one doesn’t make it into the modern Santa Claus mythos. And so much of the original Nicholas story is quite at home with the commercialization of Christmas that so many complain about today, as he’s the patron saint of merchants and pawnbrokers. And of course the merchant syndicate of Bari stealing the bones of St Nick to set up the first Santa’s grotto! One extra interesting detail about that story. Apparently as they tried to sail away with the spoils a storm blew up keeping them from departing, until it was found to have been caused by one unscrupulous, or should I say even more unscrupulous, member of the party who had secretly stashed some of the relics for himself. Once all of Nicholas’s bones had been gathered together, the ship was able to sail home. I guess it was another of Nicholas’s nautical miracles.

Of course another often overlooked element of the St Nicholas tradition is that he wasn’t a northern European, in spite of his connection to snow and reindeer. In fact he was from what is today Turkey. This is important to keep in mind in light of the recent furore over a black mall Santa, and the racist claims that Santa is white. Unfortunately there is a running racist subtext to much of this story, what with the Zwarte Piet tradition as well. Speaking of which, there’s one other explanation given of the Sinterclaas / Zwarte Piet tradition, that it represents a holdover from old Germanic myths of the god Odin (one of the other sources of the Santa figure that I discussed in my “Yule” video a couple of years ago) with his two servants, the black ravens Hugin and Munin, but the connection seems a bit of historical stretch.

Lest all this grim analysis give you the holiday blues, let me make up for it by giving you a few more entertaining tidbits that didn’t make it into the final video. One extra story about Pintard: I said he celebrated St Nicholas Day with his family. Apparently one year he made a life-size model of the saint on wheels and brought him out in front of his children on a pulley system. As Mark Forsyth reports in his excellent book A Christmas Cornucopia, his son “immediately screamed out that it was his dear departed little brother.” Poor child! When Irving took up the St Nick story, he actually published his history of New York under the suitably Dutch-sounding pseudonym Diedrich Knickerbocker, and as I said, the book became a huge success. So much so that knickerbocker became a nickname for New Yorkers, and the nickname, if you’ll excuse the pun, for their basketball team, the New York Knicks. This is also the source of the word knickerbocker trousers (as in, the type Dutch people typically wore), and the British term knickers referring to ladies’ underwear. So this joke really had legs!

Along with Moore’s famous poem “Twas the Night Before Christmas”, we also have another 19th century New Yorker, German-born Thomas Nast, to thank for our modern vision of Santa Claus. I’ve mentioned this famous caricaturist before in the “Cocktail” and “Ambition” videos. It was Nast’s depiction of St Nick that really cemented the figure in the minds of his growing army of followers and enthusiasts.

Though they’re not technically stocking treats, one’s Christmas sweet tooth is often satisfied by such confections as fruitcake, pudding, and mince pies. These desserts are all made with dried fruit, the vogue for which in Europe, like gingerbread, seems to have been brought back by those medieval crusaders from the Middle East. Hence sultana raisins from the word sultana, the title of the sultan’s wife and the word currant, a toponym from Corinth. Puddings and mince pies used to be more of a savoury dish than today and indeed mince pies contained minced meat, hence the name, and the puddings were traditionally boiled in a sheep’s stomach, hence the round cannonball shape, before the pudding basin became the preferred method of preparation. The etymology of the word pudding is an interesting one. It either comes from French boudin meaning “sausage”, from Latin botulus which also gives us the word, though hopefully not the disease, botulism. Or it comes from the Proto-Germanic root *pud- and Proto-Indo-European root *bheu- both meaning “to swell”, a root which also gives us the words pudgy (which you might want to remember before reaching for that second helping of pudding) and pout (which you’d better not do because Santa Claus is coming to town). And as yet another song goes, we sometimes refer to Christmas pudding as figgy pudding. The word fig goes back to some pre-Indo-European Mediterranean language, and the Greek form of the word fig has as cognates the tree sycamore (not so surprising), and (believe it or not) the word sycophant, which started out meaning “slanderer”. This comes about from a rude gesture, sticking the thumb between two fingers, which is meant to represent both the interior of a fig and the vagina, and so is called “showing the fig”, which apparently ancient Athenian politicians urged their followers to do to their opponents, while themselves pretending to be above such vulgarity. So feel free to share this factoid with your family over the figgy pudding!

The tradition of putting tokens like lucky coins, thimbles, or beans in the Christmas cake or pudding may go back as far as the Roman winter festival Saturnalia. One of the Roman traditions was the principle of misrule in which master and slave would change places. A survival of this may be the Bean King tradition, in which the lucky finder of the bean hidden in the Christmas cake got to be the Bean King for the day and direct all the festivities. Of course Christmas cakes also contain nuts, and it’s from this that we get the expression fruitcake for someone who is mentally deranged, as a shortening of the expression nutty as a fruitcake, with the word nuts already referring to someone who is “off his nut” so to speak.

To quaff all this down, we often at Christmas parties have hot punch or mulled cider. This tradition goes back to the wassail cup, a drink I mentioned previously in the “Yule” video. The word wassail comes from Old English wes hal meaning “be hale” or “be in good health”. A toast, if you will, which is appropriate because the wassail used to actually contain toast, kind of like putting croutons in soup, along with all kinds of other ingredients that you wouldn’t expect in a hot punch, such as egg, nuts, and cream. And in fact that’s where we get the expression to make or drink a toast, as well as “the toast of the town”. The story goes that a gentleman, back in the 18th century in the town of Bath, upon seeing a beautiful woman bathing in the public baths, as a gallant (if somewhat saucy) gesture, scooped up a drink from the bath water and drank to her health. His witty companion stated that he didn’t care much for the drink but would have the toast, that is, the woman in the water. And apparently from that we get the now well-known expression.

So here’s to your health over the holidays! I’ll leave you, as an extra present in your stocking, since you’ve been so nice, the Christmas videos from the last two years in case you have seen them.

]]>Naughty and NiceMeta Etymology and a Slice of PIEMark SundaramThu, 01 Dec 2016 18:43:35 +0000http://www.alliterative.net/blog/2016/11/29/meta-etymology-and-a-slice-of-pie53b1a859e4b037526d8e159f:53bf2b11e4b0228b71b8ae4e:583dd38c2994cabd6277cfb7This month’s video is on the etymology of the word “Etymology”:

The idea to do a video on the word etymology actually came from my 10-year-old son, and since I was already planning on doing a video explaining Proto-Indo-European, proto languages, and sound changes, the two fit together really well. The core of the script comes from a putative book I’m putting together based on the videos, so I actually had a bunch of material written already.

So one extra wrinkle on the story of Grimm’s Law is that there are some exceptions. Let’s go back to the example of father. We would expect from the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) form *pəter to get the Old English (OE) form *fæþer but instead we have OE fæder. In other words the voiceless stop t should become the fricative th-sound ([θ] for those who want an IPA transcription) but instead becomes a voiced stop d. (As a side note, the d in OE fæder eventually does become th, as in Modern English father, but that’s a later sound change that doesn’t happen until later in the Middle English period). The voiceless p at the beginning predictably becomes the fricative f, but the t doesn’t seem to follow the rule, so what gives? Well it turns out that this isn’t random and it took the Danish philologist Karl Verner to spot the regular pattern. Basically it had to do with the stress pattern in PIE. If the voiceless stop was at the start of the first syllable of the word or if it was immediately preceded by the stressed syllable of the word, it followed the usual Grimm’s Law pattern. But if the syllable before the voiceless stop was unstressed in PIE, the stop instead becomes voiced. We now refer to this addition to Grimm’s Law as Verner’s Law. By the way, if you’re interested in PIE and etymology, you might want to check out my review of Calvert Watkin’s Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, and pick up a copy to play around with. It’s inexpensive and a lot of fun.

Discussion of etymology inevitably brought up Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae, and as I pointed out, it’s much more than just a book of etymologies. One of the other important things to come out of that book is the so-called T and O maps of the world, which were the standard map arrangements of the middle ages. The T and O maps are based on Isidore’s description of the world in the Etymologiae. Though I don’t explicitly discuss the map, I do visually refer to it, including in the background, which is a manuscript image of the Etymologiae. And as I said Isidore’s book is really an encyclopedic work.

And so, the other side branch of this video is about encyclopedias. I mentioned Diderot’s Encyclopédie as one of the first modern encyclopedias, and I had been wanting to work Denis Diderot into a video for some time. He got a brief visual reference in “Sublime” and a brief mention in the associated blog post, as an iconic example of Enlightenment thought, which he wove into his encyclopedia. There’s a nice TED-Ed video on Diderot if you want more info.

I also mention Wikipedia in the video, and because of its interconnected nature, it’s one of the ways I track down all the connections for the videos I make. One useful tool for doing this is an app called Wikiweb, a reader for Wikipedia which maps out the interconnected links between the Wikipedia entries. It gives you a kind of trace of the links you’ve followed jumping from one Wikipedia entry to another. Here’s an example of what it looks like:

Excitingly, there’s a new Wikipedia-based app on the way that’s based on the Connections-style approach of James Burke, whom I’ve mentioned as inspiration of mine several times before. It’s called the James Burke Connections App, and will exist as both a web-based version and a native mobile app, and you can support its creation through Kickstarter. There’s a prototype of the app already available to play around with. Here’s an example of what it looks like:

Most excitingly, apparently the full app will have the ability to trace out chains of connections on its own. From what I understand, you give it starting and end points and it finds the connection. If you want to hear more about the project, check out the excellent interview that David McRaney did with James Burke himself. It’s a very engaging interview and it gives full details about the app and how it works. (I’m also a big fan of McRaney and his You Are Not So Smart Podcast.) Please consider supporting this worthwhile project at Kickstarter, and help support new and exciting avenues in education. I personally endorse this project and have backed it myself. I’d love to see this app become a reality, so please check it out.

James Burke’s other Connections-style project is his Knowledge Web or K-Web. You can play around with the prototype version of the K-Web implemented on TheBrain platform. As it turns out, one of the facts in my “Etymology” video comes from the K-Web, the connection between Warren Hastings and Denis Diderot (which you can read about here). It was through the K-Web that I found out about TheBrain software (which I also heartily recommend). I keep track of my own research through TheBrain, and have constructed my own database, a kind of etymological dictionary crossed with an encyclopedia, which when you think about it is kind of the ground this video covers, so very appropriate. So I’ll leave you with one last screenshot of The Endless Knot research that lies behind the video.

The main point behind this one is the interesting fact that costume and custom are essentially the same word, but came into English through different routes. Furthermore costume/custom show a similar semantic development to the two senses of the word habit. This kicked off the set of associations, but I also explore not only the interesting vocabulary of fashion, but fashion as a communicative language itself. The semiotics of fashion, that is the study of how fashion conveys meaning, is a large and very rich subject, of which I can only barely scratch the surface. Already this video was quite a long one, and there were a lot of interesting bits I had to leave out of the video.

First of all some side notes about the words custom and costume themselves. The plural form customs as in a duty that needs to be paid when importing goods comes from the sense a “customary tax”, and by further extension a customer is someone with whom we have customary business dealings. Costume was first used in English, in the periods of art history sense, by diarist John Evelyn, whom I’ve wanted to include in a video for some time as he’s one of those hyperconnected individuals, and is responsible for coining quite a few words and senses of words, and is just generally a very interesting person.

Now as for Halloween costumes and where we get the tradition of dressing up for this holiday, the ancient Celts in their harvest festival Samhain are said to have dressed up in scary disguises, either to blend in with or scare off other spirits who were believed to arise at that time of year. There’s also the English tradition of souling, going door-to-door in costume around All Souls Day carrying turnip lanterns representing the souls in Purgatory, and offering blessings or songs in return for soul-cakes. Similarly there’s the Scottish and Irish tradition of Guising, going door-to-door in costumes asking for handouts. And then there’s Mumming, an old tradition of costumed dances and little plays performed at various seasons of the year. These various tradition seem to have served two purposes. For one, it relieves the tension from the fear of evil spirits or the souls of the dead. Another is the element of misrule and breaking of taboos which I mentioned in the video. Both of these elements highlight the use of jest and game to lessen the impact of very serious cultural realities. If you’re interested in more about these and other Halloween traditions, I covered many of them in last year’s Halloween video “Jack-o’-Lantern”.

Now getting back to clothing and fashion. One of the sources I looked at suggested that the wimple may have been influenced by or adopted from Muslim women, and thus brought to Europe from the middle east during the crusades. If anyone can provide more information on this I’d be grateful, but there certainly is a similarity between the wimple and the hijab. Sticking with head coverings, I mentioned the 18th century vogue for the wig. An interesting puzzle is the word wig itself. It’s actually short for periwig, which has the earlier forms perwike and peruke, and comes from French perruque and Italian perrucca. But before that the trail runs cold.

On the other hand, I can give some deeper etymologies of some other words mentioned in the video. As I said, jeans comes from Genoa. But where does the name for this Italian city come from? Well there are a couple of theories. First of all the Latin form of the name is Genua. Etymonline suggests it might come from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning “curve, bend” and would thus be cognate with Geneva. This root is presumably *genu- meaning “knee, angle”, and also gives us the words knee, kneel, genuflect, and diagonal. Another theory is that it’s related to Latin janua meaning “gate”, and thus also the Roman god Janus, as well as the month name January. As for denim from the city Nîmes, the French placename come from Latin Nemausus and ultimately from the Gaulish word nemo meaning “sanctuary”. This also seems to be connected to a Celtic god which the Romans referred to as Deus Nemausus, the god of a healing-spring sanctuary in the ancient town there. So if you think you look divine in those jeans, what with Nemausus and Janus, you may be right!

And speaking of jeans, I refer to them as an icon of contemporary fashion, probably the 20th century’s most enduring one. But to complete the look I suppose we could include T-shirts and sneakers. So as for the T-shirt, obviously named for its shape, it was originally designed as an undershirt to go with US military uniforms, but many servicemen began wearing just their T-shirts with their uniform trousers as a casual outfit during their off-duty hours, and when film star Marlon Brando appeared in the movie A Streetcar Named Desire dressed in a T-shirt, a fashion style was born. And next the sneaker, an early example of which is the Converse All-Stars, which was also one of the first instances of a celebrity endorsement when basketball star Chuck Taylor joined their sales force in 1921, suggesting improvements to their shoe design, and his signature was added to the ankle patch on the shoes we now often refer to as Chuck Taylors or simply Chucks. The term sneaker by the way dates from the end of 19th century and is originally American, though it’s predated slightly by the term sneak. There are of course many other names for different varieties of casual soft-soled shoe including running shoes, trainers, sand shoes, deck shoes, tennis shoes, and plimsolls, an eponym from politician Samuel Plimsoll who devised the plimsoll line, the water line markings on the side of a ship which showed the maximum load a ship could safely carry — the shoes took their name from the similarity of their appearance to ships with these lines on the side. And as for celebrity endorsements, they have since become quite the big deal with sneakers, and T-shirts have become an important canvas on which to display a variety of messages the wearer wishes to convey to the world, so again fashion as language.

In addition to T-shirts with political or social slogans (which became particularly popular starting in the 1980s), fashion can often be used to make political or social statements. To give just two such examples of statements calling for change, at the 1968 Olympics African-American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos held up black-gloved fists during their medal ceremonies as an anti-racism statement. And the name of 19th century feminist Amelia Bloomer, who advocated against the restrictive clothing women were forced to wear at the time, became associated with bloomers, a kind of loose fitting split-leg garment, sometimes worn as more comfortable underwear and sometimes as trousers. Once again, the language of fashion and fashion as language. Let me know of any other examples of this kind of use of fashion in the comments below.

But getting back to the 20th century US military influence on fashion, one perhaps surprising example is the bikini, which inventor Louis Réard named after the Bikini Atoll where the US military conducted its first peace-time nuclear weapons test. Réard hoped his invention would cause a similar "explosive commercial and cultural reaction", and indeed it did. The placename Bikini, by the way is Marshallese for “coconut place”.

In the video I mentioned Beau Brummell’s influence on the men’s formal suit. Brummell was fond of wearing dark colours as opposed to the more brightly coloured outfits of preceding generations. But we have another historical figure, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who by the way gave us the cliche novel opening “It was a dark and stormy night” (you may remember him from our “Beef” video), to thank for the habit of wearing black as formal wear, as in the tailcoat and the tuxedo. As for the invention of tuxedo itself, one story goes that Edward VII, then Prince of Wales, wanting a more comfortable formal outfit than the black tailcoat, took to wearing a short military style jacket. His American guest at the time, James Potter, brought the style back with him, and after wearing it at the fashionable resort of Tuxedo Park in New York, a style and its name were born. The place name itself, by the way, seems to come from Algonquian p'tuck-sepo meaning “crooked river”. On the subject of the tuxedo, the term Canadian tuxedo refers to wearing denim on top and on bottom, so jeans and a jean jacket for instance. And the term Canadian passport, according to Urban Dictionary, is another term for the mullet cut. I don’t want to think what all this implies about Canadians!

But while we’re still on the subject of men’s formal wear, the top hat is said to have been invented by John Hetherington, who supposedly first wore this shiny silk hat designed to “frighten timid people” on January 15, 1797, causing a riot with women fainting, children screaming, and dogs yelping, leading to his being charged with a breach of the peace! Unfortunately this story may be apocryphal. Nevertheless, the hat did become a major fashion trend of the 19th century, and already by 1814 we have the first recorded instance of someone pulling a rabbit out of a top hat, the French magician Louis Comte.

Another probably apocryphal hat story is about the invention of the bowler. Finding the tall top hat inconvenient when horse riding as it got caught up in low-hanging tree branches, wealthy British landowner William Coke commissioned a hat with a low round crown. The hat was manufactured by one William Bowlers. Of course it might just be the bowl shape of the hat that led to its name. But I’ll make the hat trick by relaying a third hat story. The fedora takes its name from a play, the only such instance of an etymology I can think of. In the play Fedora by Victorien Sardou, famous actress Sarah Bernhardt wore a soft felt hat while playing the title role of Princess Fedora Romanoff, and the hat became a popular fashion choice.

Speaking of fashion trendsetters, I mentioned Empress Josephine’s role in popularizing the empire waist dress, a neoclassical reinvention of the ancient Greek peplos. Another important trendsetter in the development of this type of dress was Emma, Lady Hamilton (or Emma Hart as she was known at the time), who was the lover of Charles Greville (whom you may remember as a friend of Erasmus Darwin in our previous video on him). Greville, tiring of his mistress, shipped her off to Italy to become the mistress and eventually wife of Sir William Hamilton, who was the English ambassador in Naples. While there Emma invented a kind of performance art she called Attitudes, posing in various alluring poses recreating scenes from Greek mythology, and wearing that type of ancient dress. The artist George Romney painted many of these scenes, and her fashion sense took Europe by storm. Well, I guess high fashion is all about attitude.

Speaking of ancient Greece, professional barbers or hair cutters go back at least as far as ancient Greece, where the barbershop was already an important location for conversation and gossip. The Greeks introduced the profession to the Romans who called the barber a tonsor, related to our word tonsure. During the middle ages barbers also served as surgeons — after all they already had sharp razors — and that’s the source of the barber pole, the red stripes reflecting the blood involved. The word surgery by the way comes through Latin chirurgia ultimately from ancient Greek kheirurgia meaning literally “hand work”. So some extra tidbits next time you’re gossipping with your barber.

Also in the ancient world, I briefly mention the toga, which connects nicely with our last video “Ambition” and the toga candida, the “whitened toga”, worn by political candidates in Rome, and indeed that’s where the word candidate comes from. Also worthy of mention is the toga praetexta, which had a purple border, and was worn, curiously, by both by young boys who were not yet of age and by magistrates, purple being a colour that signified high status, but more on this when we come to purple in our ongoing series of colour podcasts. Interesting too that the one exception to the rule that only freeborn males were allowed to wear togas was that prostitutes were required to wear them, an example I suppose of boundary crossing. They couldn’t wear the traditional stola, the dress of the Roman matron, and I suppose had something of the male freedom in terms of their status—in the sense that they were not restricted by the modesty of a respectable woman. The toga, though, showed that they also lacked the legal protection of a citizen woman, and that their bodies were essentially common property.

In the video I highlighted the importance of France as the home of fashion by tracing the series of leaders from Louis XIV and his wigs, to Louis XV and his mistress Madame de Pompadour, to Louis XVI and his wife and “queen of fashion” Marie Antoinette, leading up to the French Revolution, to finally the more reserved styles after the revolution with Empress Josephine, wife of Napoleon Bonaparte. I could perhaps add one other link to this chain, with Napoleon’s nephew and heir Napoleon III and his wife Eugénie de Montijo. She influence the work of designer Charles Worth, who is known as the father of haute-couture, and who founded the first great fashion house, the House of Worth.

And finally one last point about fashion as language. A friend once pointed out to me that someone mixing clashing styles of clothing was engaging in something like code-switching. Code-switching is a linguistics term that refers to when speakers of more than one language naturally switch back and forth between languages in the middle of conversation. It’s not a random phenomenon, but is indeed itself a communicative element of language — the choice of language at any one instant communicates something of importance in the discourse. Applying this to clothing is, I think, quite relevant, particularly in our modern, uncentred contemporary fashions. So feel free to add in the comments any other ways fashion is like language — I’d love to hear some other views.

]]>Fashionably SpeakingThe words they are a-changin': Making change in the world of politicsMark SundaramWed, 05 Oct 2016 21:28:58 +0000http://www.alliterative.net/blog/2016/10/5/the-words-they-are-a-changin53b1a859e4b037526d8e159f:53bf2b11e4b0228b71b8ae4e:57f5696f29687f5fead68ec3This week’s video takes on all the election hoopla by looking at the word “ambition” and other political vocabulary:

Ambition itself was the jumping off point here, and its surprising etymology and background in the world of Roman politics, and since politics is in the news so much lately with the US 2016 election going on, it seemed a fitting time to take this one on. But more than just giving a rundown of political vocabulary, which has already been so well done by others such as the Allusionist and numerous Mashed Radish posts (such as this excellent one on the word “candidate”), I wanted to add the further dimension of how language change and changing values go hand in hand. Our words reflect our current value systems, and both are very changeable, as with the positive and pejorative senses of the word “ambition”. Another literary example of this that I mentioned before in our video “Paddle Your Own Canoe” is the continual reinterpretation of the figure of Odysseus/Ulysses over the years. In the ancient epic The Odyssey, after returning home from the Trojan War, Odysseus is giving a prophecy that he must make another journey, and having already been away from home for 20 years and struggling so hard to return he isn’t really happy about this. In the medieval poem The Inferno (the first part of his Divine Comedy), Dante puts Ulysses in Hell for going journeying again as he takes it as an act of ambition. When the Victorian poet tells the story in his poem “Ulysses” he celebrates the hero’s ambition and striving. We make of ambition what we will, depending on values and contexts.

I don’t have too much left on the table for this one, just a few little tidbits that didn’t fit into the final video. The word “poll”, meaning originally “head” may well come from the same root as “ballot”, or at least one akin to it (see the excellent Mashed Radish post on the word “poll”). If so, that would be a nice extra connection tying “poll” and “ballot” together.

In Canadian political circles by the way, the riding is not officially termed a riding. It’s officially an electoral district, but the name is so commonly used that even Elections Canada, the body that oversees elections, uses the term in common contexts. By the way, we can see a similar formation to that thrithing sense of three parts in the word farthing, an old denomination of coin in Britain. It’s worth a quarter of a penny, hence the name, and in the middle ages it was even common to produce one by literally cutting a penny in four, as you can see below:

And as for the Canadian Parliament, the upper house is actually called the Senate. I wonder how this term was adopted. It obviously couldn’t be called the House of Lords as in Britain, so did they borrow the name from the US? If there are any experts out there on Canadian political history, I’d love some insight. Also, are there other countries that have senates? Let me know in the comments. Also, I greatly simplified the discussion of the history of early US political parties — there were numerous parties back then with shifting platforms, and I’m only vaguely aware of this fascinating complexity so also feel free to chime in with any interesting points I’ve left out.

But speaking of Icelandic etymologies, the Althing makes me think of the temporary dwellings that attendees of these old medieval councils stayed in — which were called “booths”. That’s where we get the word “booth”. It comes from a Germanic root that means “to dwell” and also gives us the second elements in the words neighbour and husband, and goes back to a Proto-Indo-European root which means to exist, giving us “be”. There’s a wonderfully detailed post on the word “booth” by Anatoly Liberman.

If you want to hear more about neoclassical and gothic architecture, check out our video “Sublime” in which we get into the topic in much more detail. Oh and if Thomas Nast rings a bell, you may remember him from our “Cocktail” video from way back, with his connection to the first celebrity bartender Jerry Thomas.

Since I gave the Greek origin of the term “idiot” I thought I might here round out Goddard’s other categories. The word “imbecile” comes through French from Latin in- meaning “not” and baculum meaning “stick”, the idea being that someone is “weak” because they lack support, and this weakness narrowed in sense to refer to those weak in the mind. "Moron" comes ultimately from Greek moros meaning “foolish, stupid”, and though there isn’t an earlier etymon for this, there does seem to be a Sanskrit cognate murah. By the way, Goddard himself had this to say about democracy: “Democracy, then, means that the people rule by selecting the wisest, most intelligent and most human to tell them what to do to be happy.” I’m not sure that this fits with most people’s definition of democracy.

And finally a little bit more about politics in the ancient world. In ancient Athens, though opinions about democracy were indeed mixed, that didn’t stop them from personifying the concept as the goddess Demokratia, and making offerings to her. The assembly was called the Ekklesia, literally meaning “calling out”. The word was adopted to refer to the church in Christian times, and we get the English word “ecclesiastical” from it. Voting was done initially by a show of hands, though without an exact count — I guess they just estimated. Ballots were, however, used in the law courts. One particular instance of voting in ancient Greece is ostracism, which was exiling someone dangerous to the state for a period of 10 years. Voting was done with pottery fragments called in ancient Greek ostrakon, related to osteon meaning “bone” (from which we get medical terms like osteoporosis and osteoarthritis) and ostreon meaning “oyster” (from which we get the word oyster). The most notable difference between Athenian democracy and our modern systems, by the way, was that with the exception of some military positions, the government officials were not elected, but chosen by lot, essentially at random out of the entire citizen body, and officials only held their positions for a year. This meant that there were very few political campaigns, and prevented the development of an exclusive political class like at Rome. (This radical form of the democracy was fairly short-lived, however, lasting about 150 years).

In ancient Rome voting was initially oral, with officials called rogatores (literally “questioners”) asking each voter for their vote and then writing it down, but later secret ballots involving wax tablets were instituted. Interestingly, it was not simple majorities but voting blocks that decided elections, with voters voting in assigned groups and the group vote as a whole following the winner of that group, a bit similar I suppose to the winner-take-all system of winning whole states in the US Electoral College system. In terms of the popularism in Roman politics, we can talk of the two major factions, the Populares who appealed to the lower classes and the popular assembly to achieve political ends, countering the ruling elite who stressed the authority of the Senate, known (at least to themselves) as the Optimates meaning literally “the best” — though the leaders of both groups were from the elite senatorial class, so we shouldn’t think of the Populares as proto-Marxists or anything. This political situation is one of the major features of Roman politics, especially during the later Republic — for instance Julius Caesar was considered one of the Populares, and Cicero was an Optimate. It’s not dissimilar to modern politics in the US and many other countries, where even though the political platforms of the parties may be aimed at the working class or the middle class, the politicians all usually end up coming from the wealthy elite. Some things don’t change, I guess!

]]>The words they are a-changin': Making change in the world of politicsThe Slippery History of LinoleumMark SundaramThu, 25 Aug 2016 21:12:28 +0000http://www.alliterative.net/blog/2016/8/25/the-slippery-history-of-linoleum53b1a859e4b037526d8e159f:53bf2b11e4b0228b71b8ae4e:57bf56e7e3df2854ac61aa50This week’s video looks at the word “Linoleum”:

The real subject of the video is trademarks, as linoleum is the first example of genericide, when a trademark name loses its trademark status and becomes the generic term to refer to the product category rather than one particular maker of the product. And as such it completes a series of videos we’ve made about intellectual property, first “Bug”, which also told the story of the history of patents:

And then “Freebooting”, which also told the story of the history of copyright:

If you haven’t seen those earlier videos, do go back and check them out. As for this blog post, there are just a few tidbits that didn’t make it into the video. Of course the other major use that linoleum has been put to is linocut, a kind of more modern version of woodcut printing, in which an image is carved into a sheet of linoleum which can then be inked and pressed onto paper to reproduce the image. Linocut became popular with artists in the early 20th century, but it had also been used to produce wallpaper.

And speaking of wall coverings, Frederick Walton, the inventor of linoleum, also invented Lincrusta, a wall covering similarly based on linseed oil, but instead embossed to produced its decorative effect. In addition to being used in many Victorian era buildings, it was famously used in the White House, and as with linoleum there’s a nautical connection here, as it was used in the staterooms on the Titanic. As for the name, Walton initially called his new invention Linoleum Muralis, literally “wall linoleum”, changed it to Lincrusta-Walton, still reflecting the crucial linseed ingredient with “crusta” to reflect the embossed nature of the product, and notable attaching his own name to the product, having seemingly learnt from his previous problems with genericide.

You may also be wondering about the word linotype by the way. In fact it has nothing to do with linoleum or linseed oil, but is instead a typesetting technique that produces full lines of type at a time instead of letter by letter, so is literally a contraction of “line o’ type”.

As one helpful commenter (Frahamen) on the video points out, the Manet painting “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” was painted with linseed oil based paint, so there’s another nice connection. According to art historian Kenneth Bendiner, the inclusion of the English Bass ale instead of German beer is a nationalist and jingoistic reaction against Germany, as the French had recently lost Alsace to the Germans after the Franco-Prussian War. (Another interesting outcome of the Franco-Prussian War is that it led to the invention of Bovril, a story I tell in the video “Beef”).

The Krupp company has come up before in our videos, in “Rune”, because of their logo and manufacturing of the famous gun Big Bertha. As another helpful commenter (Zheeraffa1) on the video points out, the modern incarnation of the company, ThyssenKrupp, is a major escalator manufacturer, tying it back into another one of those genericided trademarks.

And finally on to what is probably the most interesting etymological story in the video, that of gasoline. It had previously been assumed that gasoline simply came from gas, a little odd given that gasoline is a liquid not a gas, that is until researchers at the Oxford English Dictionary uncovered the evidence about John Cassell and his Cazoline, about which discovery you can read more in the Oxford Dictionaries blog. Still, it seems likely that the word gas still had some influence on the form gasoline, not to mention the common North American abbreviation gas. And as per the video, we have Jean Baptist van Helmont’s Flemish pronunciation of Greek chaos to thank for that word. Here’s van Helmont’s actual quotation on the subject (quoted from the OED):

‘halitum illum Gas vocavi, non longe a Chao veterum secretum’, ‘I have called this vapour gas, not far removed from the Chaos of the ancients’

Here is the passage from Hesiod’s Theogony that introduces the Chaos, that is the void before creation, that van Helmont was referring to (quoted from Wikisource):

“Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundation of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Eros (Love), fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them. From Chaos came forth Erebus and black Night; but of Night were born Aether and Day, whom she conceived and bare from union in love with Erebus. And Earth first bare starry Heaven, equal to herself, to cover her on every side, and to be an ever-sure abiding-place for the blessed gods. And she brought forth long Hills, graceful haunts of the goddess-Nymphs who dwell amongst the glens of the hills. She bare also the fruitless deep with his raging swell, Pontus, without sweet union of love. But afterwards she lay with Heaven and bare deep-swirling Oceanus, Coeus and Crius and Hyperion and Iapetus, Theia and Rhea, Themis and Mnemosyne and gold-crowned Phoebe and lovely Tethys. After them was born Cronos the wily, youngest and most terrible of her children, and he hated his lusty sire.”

And for comparison, here is the Ginnungagap from the Norse story of creation, as told by Snorri Sturluson:

“Ginnungagap, the Yawning Void ... which faced toward the northern quarter, became filled with heaviness, and masses of ice and rime, and from within, drizzling rain and gusts; but the southern part of the Yawning Void was lighted by those sparks and glowing masses which flew out of Múspellheim”

And one last detail. I mentioned that the British term petrol is short for petroleum. Specifically it came to the British idiom from the tradenamed product of the appropriately named company Petrochem Carless Ltd, one of the first oil companies. The company tried to register the name Petrol as a trademark, but this attempt failed presumably because the word had already been used to refer to a lamp oil in French. I say appropriately named because this petrol was initially intended as a solvent for removing nits, that is the eggs of lice, not as a fuel for cars. It was only later with the advent of the internal combustion engine that the petrol was found to be an ideal fuel. The company was actually called Petrochem Carless because it was founded by one Eugene Carless in 1859, coincidentally the same year the first oil well was drilled (in Titusville Pennsylvania), kicking off the first oil boom in the United States. Here’s a picture of that historic first oil derrick, Drake Well.

]]>The Slippery History of LinoleumMaking it weirdMark SundaramThu, 21 Apr 2016 21:32:08 +0000http://www.alliterative.net/blog/2016/4/21/making-it-weird53b1a859e4b037526d8e159f:53bf2b11e4b0228b71b8ae4e:571940acd51cd4ebf0493505In honour of the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare, and his weird sisters, this week’s video looks at the history of the word weird:

The word for this video was chosen by popular vote after I asked for feedback in a previous video over the summer, so thanks to everyone for voting and giving me your feedback. “Weird” was the clear winner, and it certainly made it easy on me as it intersected with my dissertation topic from my grad school days, which looked at the conceptualisation of futurity in Old English. In my dissertation I looked at the nascent constructions for expressing future time in Old English, which didn’t have a regularized future tense. It started off with the question of how Anglo-Saxon translators handled Latin with its future tense, particularly with all the Christian texts which often dealt so explicitly with the future and the afterlife, and then expanded from there into a broader question of what language and language change can tell us about cultural concepts about time and the future. So wyrd in its original sense of fate was an element in that work. I’ve also blogged before about my ongoing interests about time, cognition, and language, so if you’re interested in reading more on the topic, you can see here and here.

The timing also fit well with the Shakespearean anniversary, and as an extra tie-in you can also have a listen to our Shakespeare film podcast episode on the recent film adaptation of Macbeth featuring Michael Fassbender. The great similarities and significant differences between Shakespeare’s treatment of the Weird Sisters and what he found in his source, Holinsed’s Chronicles, are interesting and instructive, and I’ll quote Holinshed’s version of the entire encounter at the end of this blog post below, but in his passage the three women are referred to as being “in strange and wild apparell, resembling creatures of elder world” and are referred to as “either the weird sisters, that is (as ye would say) the goddesses of destinie, or else some nymphs or feiries, indued with knowledge of prophesie by their necromanticall science”.

It’s a curious thing that the word ‘weird’ owes its reintroduction to the language pretty much entirely to Shakespeare’s play, and even more curious because it was a misunderstanding of the sense of the word. It really does seem to be the Romantic poets, particularly Percy Shelley, as well as John Keats, who popularised the new sense of the word. It’s in Shelley’s 1816 poem Alastor that we see the first glimpse of this new sense in the lines “ In lone and silent hours, / When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness” and “the woven leaves / make net-work of the dark blue light of day, / And the night’s noontide clearness, mutable / As shapes in the weird clouds.” Then a few years later John Keats seems to pick up on his friend’s unusual word in the 1820 poem Lamia: “I took compassion on her, bade her steep / Her hair in weïrd syrops, that would keep / Her loveliness invisible, yet free / To wander as she loves, in liberty.” Given that the word was somewhat recherché to begin with, only known through Shakespeare and in Scots English, it’s perhaps not too surprising that we owe such a now seemingly common and even slangy word to the pens of Romantic poets. Interestingly the word doesn’t really seem to pick up until the latter half of the 19th century, and even suffers something of a decline in the first half of the 20th, only gaining in popularity again around 1980 (see the chart below for the for the frequency of weird and some of its close synonyms). As the citations in the OED suggest, the word was picked up by such potboiler writers as Charles Dickens and Edward Bulwer-Lytton (about whom I’ve spoken earlier in “Beef”), which might explain the mid-19th century uptick. As for the 1980s I suppose we can look to the pop culture references like the ones I mentioned in the video (Weird Al Yankovic and the movie Weird Science). It does seem to be in fairly contemporary usage that the word has reached its peak.

Now a few words about the Proto-Indo-European root. From the base *wer- derives a number of other PIE roots which then lead to a variety of English words through different routes. The main one from the video is *wert- which gives us not only weird and the various words ending in -ward but also worth, and the universe of words from the versatile Latin word vertere (including of course universe and versatile). The derived root *wreit- (also meaning “turn”) gives us wreath and wrath (think twisted with anger), and the root *wergh- gives us words such as wring, worry, and wrong. The root *werg- gives us wrench and wrinkle, *wreik- leads to wry, wrigle, and wrist, *werb- gives us reverberate, and *werp- gives us wrap. And of course as mentioned in the video, *wrmi- gives us worm, as well as vermicelli — think about that the next time you eat noodles. So as you can see this is a very large collection of cognates, and enough turning words to make your head spin.

Now for a bit more about the Norns. By some accounts there were actually many other Norns, who attended the birth of every child, but Urðr, Verðandi, and Skuld were the chief ones. Here’s the description in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda: “There stands a fair hall under the ash, by the well, and out of this hall there come three maidens, who are called Urd, Verdandi and Skuld. These maidens shape the lives of men; we call them Norns. But there are other Norns who visit every child that is born, to shape its life, and they are descended from the Æsir, others still are descended from the Elves, and a third kind from the race of Dwarfs … good Norns, from a noble line, shape good lives, but wicked Norns are to blame for those whose lives are miserable.” This may be echoed in the idea of good and wicked fairy godmothers in fairy tales like Sleeping Beauty. The name Skuld also appears as a name of one of the Valkyrie, but these two groups of women seem to have been conflated somewhat in some traditions. The forest maidens mentioned in Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum (“Deeds of the Danes”) are indeed a striking parallel with the Weird Sisters and come across as something like the Norns, but are also similar to the Valkyrie: “About this time Hother chanced, while hunting, to be led astray by a mist, and he came on a certain lodge in which were wood-maidens; and when they greeted him by his own name, he asked who they were. They declared that it was their guidance and government that mainly determined the fortunes of war. For they often invisibly took part in battles, and by their secret assistance won for their friends the coveted victories.” And like Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters, they appear to Hother again later to render him further assistance.

And finally some more senses of “weird”. In the video I focussed mainly on the noun and adjective uses of “weird” but it can also appear as a verb, from the Middle English period in the sense of “to assign a fate” or in the passive voice meaning “to be destined”. When Frank Herbert used the word “weirding” in his novel Dune, he was drawing both on the supernatural or magical sense of the word that developed later and on its earlier fate-related elements. But perhaps the most familiar use of the verb today is in the expression “to weird out” as in “to make someone feel uncomfortable”. In mathematics there’s also a concept called “weird numbers” which are explained in Wikipedia: “ the sum of the proper divisors (divisors including 1 but not itself) of the number is greater than the number, but no subset of those divisors sums to the number itself.” So for instance 70 whose “divisors are 1, 2, 5, 7, 10, 14, and 35; these sum to 74, but no subset of these sums to 70.” There’s also an acronym WEIRD, “western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic” used in psychology to refer to the statistical bias that often occurs in psychological studies that are, as is often the case, based on a sampling of the easily available undergraduate students, who therefore might not represent the population at large. So I suppose in a certain sense what seems normal might actually be weird. (And again, as Professor Elemental tells us, "There's no such thing as normal, everybody's weird!")

Here’s the full passage from Holinshed:

Shortlie after happened a strange and vncouth woonder, which afterward was the cause of much trouble in the realme of Scotland, as ye shall after heare. It fortuned as Makbeth and Banquho iournied towards Fores, where the king then laie, they went sporting by the waie togither without other companie, saue onelie themselues, passing thorough the woods and fields, when suddenlie in the middest of a laund, there met them thrée women in strange and wild apparell, resembling creatures of elder world, whome when they attentiuelie beheld, woondering much at the sight, the first of them spake and said; "All haile Makbeth, thane of Glammis" (for he had latelie entered into that dignitie and office by the death of his father Sinell.) The second of them said; "Haile Makbeth thane of Cawder." But the third said; "All haile Makbeth that héerafter shalt be king of Scotland."

Then Banquho; "What manner of women (saith he) are you, that séeme so little fauourable vnto me, whereas to my fellow heere, besides high offices, ye assigne also the kingdome, appointing foorth nothing for me at all?" "Yes (saith the first of them) we promise greater benefits vnto thée, than vnto him, for he shall reigne in déed, but with an vnluckie end: neither shall he leaue anie issue behind him to succéed in his place, where contrarilie thou in déed shalt not reigne at all, but of thée those shall be borne which shall gouerne the Scotish kingdome by long order of continuall descent." Herewith the foresaid women vanished immediatlie out of their sight. This was reputed at the first but some vaine fantasticall illusion by Mackbeth and Banquho, insomuch that Banquho would call Mackbeth in iest, king of Scotland; and Mackbeth againe would call him in sport likewise, the father of manie kings. But afterwards the common opinion was, that these women were either the weird sisters, that is (as ye would say) the goddesses of destinie, or else some nymphs or feiries, indued with knowledge of prophesie by their necromanticall science, bicause euerie thing came to passe as they had spoken. For shortlie after, the thane of Cawder being condemned at Fores of treason against the king committed; his lands, liuings, and offices were giuen of the kings liberalitie to Mackbeth.

]]>Making it weirdSpirit of the AgeMark SundaramWed, 06 Apr 2016 18:36:08 +0000http://www.alliterative.net/blog/2016/4/6/spirit-of-the-age53b1a859e4b037526d8e159f:53bf2b11e4b0228b71b8ae4e:570544633c44d86b9359d0e7In honour of April Fool’s Day, this week’s video looks at the classic cocktail the “Tom Collins”:

The name Tom, by the way, is a biblical name from a semitic root meaning “twin”, and the name Collins is a diminutive of Nicholas, which comes from Greek meaning “victory people”, the first element being Nike, the goddess of victory, who of course lends her name appropriately to the sportswear company. The inspiration for this video came from the story of the “Tom Collins” hoax, which presented the opportunity to cover a number of historical hoaxes, many of which I knew about because I’d been reading Justin Pollard’s entertaining book Secret Britain. The obvious timing for such a video was April Fool’s Day, so I could also include a bit about the history of that tradition as well. I should also draw special attention to the website of The Museum of Hoaxes, which provided much useful research, and is excellently well documented. (See the show notes page for all the sources used.) There’s also a timely footnote to this video in the recent rediscovery of that book Houdini hired H.P. Lovecraft (and co-writer C.M. Eddy) to write. You can read about the recovery of the manuscript of The Cancer of Superstitionhere.

The underlying theme behind this video, beyond the cocktail and the hoaxes and practical jokes themselves, is the way hoaxes tend to capture the spirit of the age they’re from. This is a bit similar to myth and urban legend, as I discussed in the video “The Story of Narrative”. When a hoax captures the public imagination, it sometimes does so because it is in tune with the zeitgeist, and reflects the preoccupations of the time. In this blog post I’ll have another look at some of the hoaxes mentioned in the video, as well as some others, in their historical context, to track this phenomenon.

But first a few more details about the origins of April Fool’s Day. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest English use of the phrase April Fool is from 1629 in Edmund Lechmere’s A Disputation of the Church wherein the Old Religion is Maintained: “For my part, I was not willing at the sight of yours (which I espied by meere chaunce, and neuer sawe but once) to be made an Aprill foole, and therefore would not be so farre at your commaund.” So the tradition has been in England since at least that time. John Aubrey’s reference mentioned in the video is somewhat later in 1686. Though it isn’t a clear reference to April Fool’s Day itself, the earliest use of the French phrase poisson d’avril is apparently from 1508 in the poem “Le livre de la deablerie” by French composer Eloy d’Amerval: “maquereau infâme de maint homme et de mainte femme, poisson d'avril.”

Now as for Geoffrey Chaucer, he establishes the date for the story "The Nun's Priest's Tale" in a rather roundabout and perhaps intentionally foolish way: “whan that the month in which the world bigan, that highte March, whan God first maked man, was complet, and passed were also, sin March bigan, thritty dayes and two” (3187-90). (You can hear me reading out the full passage here, if you wish). Thirty two days since March began would be April 1st, but the following passage gives complex astrological indications that are more in keeping with a date in May: “Bifel that Chauntecleer, in al his pryde, his seven wyves walking by his syde, caste up his eyen to the brighte sonne, that in the signe of Taurus hadde y-ronne twenty degrees and oon, and somwhat more; and knew by kynde, and by noon other lore, that it was pryme, and crew with blisful stevene.” (3191-97). Now apparently, this information, if you account for the 12 days offset because of the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, would yield a date of May 3rd, so many editors emend the text to “sin March was gon thritty dayes and two” making the date instead May 3rd there as well, a date Chaucer mentions quite often in other contexts as well and so is often referred to as his favourite date. What I wonder, though, is how much would this be off because of orbital precession in the 600-plus years since Chaucer’s time? At a rough guess I figure it would be out by over a week. Perhaps someone with more astronomical knowledge than I have can work this out. And in any case, all the manuscripts seem to agree on the reading “sin March bigan” so I’m inclined not to emend to “sin March was gon” and to try to make sense of the text as we have it. Since the tale contains a rooster and a chicken debating the philosophy of predestination and prophetic dreams, perhaps this dating is supposed to be inconsistent. In any case, take it as you will, but it may be of some small interest that Valentine’s Day also may owe its origin to a confused date in a Geoffrey Chaucer poem, The Parliament of Fowls, as I discussed in my video “Cuckold”. Or maybe Chaucer is just pranking us! (For more information, you can read The Museum’s detailed analysis of the Chaucer question here.)

There’s another connection here to Chaucer and my video “Cuckold”, in which I talk about the cuckoo bird. In the Wise Men of Gotham story we hear about the foolish attempt to fence in a cuckoo bird. Also, the cuckoo makes another appearance in the Scottish tradition, where April 1st was (and perhaps still is?) known as Hunt the Gowk day, gowk being the Scottish and northern English word for the bird, related to Old English geac. In the Scottish tradition the celebration continued with April 2nd being Tail day, when you stick a paper tail on people’s back, reminiscent of the French paper fish prank. So there does seem to be cluster of connections here, for what it’s worth.

In addition to the King John Gotham story, a number of historical events have been connected with April Fool’s Day over the years, such as the Dutch capture of Den Briel from Spanish forces on April 1, 1572, but none of these connections seem entirely convincing either. Now it’s possible that the tradition reaches back to some misrule festival which often takes place in the spring, such as the Roman festival of Hilaria, though there is little direct evidence for such links, but it’s been argued by Ronald Hutton (see show notes page) that as the misrule elements traditionally associated with Christmas faded, greater emphasis came to be placed on the spring equinox and April Fool’s Day. For more on the many and varied theories on the origins of April Fool tradition, see the Museum of Hoaxes very detailed page on the topic.

The Dreadnought hoax (about which you can read in full here) actually had a precursor. While studying at Cambridge, Horace de Vere Cole became friends with Adrian Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s brother), and the two started to get up to a number of minor pranks to entertain themselves. Their most elaborate was to pose as dignitaries from Zanzibar and enjoy an official reception from the mayor of Cambridge. It was years later that they decided to pull off a more elaborate version of the same prank, this time with some other confederates involved. The stunt seems to have been responsible for launching into public attention the loose collective of artists, writers, and other intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury group, which most famously included Virgina Woolf, and was in keeping with their pacifism and rejection of Victorian values.

There’s an interesting backstory to the Cock Lane Ghost affair. William Kent and Fanny Lynes were not legally able to be married as she was the sister of his now-deceased wife, and by law that was considered incest. They had thus moved from Norfolk to London to take advantage of the relative anonymity of the big city, where they could pose as a married couple. While staying at the house of Richard Parsons, Fanny would hear an otherworldly scratching noise, which she took to be her sister’s warning from beyond the grave of some great danger. This backstory and the mayhem of the Berners Street hoax (about which you can read more fully here), highlight the dramatic demographic changes going on in England in the 18th and 19th centuries, with the staggering shift in population from the countryside to the urban areas. From the 18th century onwards there was a dramatic overall rise in the English population, and following a trend already beginning in that century, at the start of the 19th century something like one-fifth of the population lived in cities, but by the end of the 19th century it was more than three-quarters, while the rural populations dropped.

This alarming trend in demographics and the perceived threat of industrialisation is also one of the things that lies behind the celebration of nature and the countryside by the Romantic poets and artists. And it also explains their attraction to the medieval which they saw as a kind of golden age of a rural, pastoral world, with knights riding through the idyllic country on their chivalric quests. So they were ripe for the Ossian and Thomas Rowley medieval literary forgeries perpetrated by James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton respectively.

Of course the science vs superstition tension also lies behind the Piltdown Man and Cottingly Fairies hoaxes. Photography was still relatively new by the beginning of the 20th century, so perhaps it’s not so surprising that people were fooled by photographs of cardboard cutout fairies. It’s interesting to note the impact that near ubiquitous camera phones have had on similar phenomena like UFOs and Bigfoot or Loch Ness Monster pictures. If one were to extrapolate from the frequency of such pictures before the camera phone, we should be flooded with evidence of the supernatural by now. Times change.

There are some other hoaxes that I didn’t have time to mention in the video, such as the 18th century rabbit babies of Mary Toft about which you can read the (disturbing) details here. What’s most notable about this hoax, which was accomplished by inserting rabbits (or parts of rabbits) into Mary Toft’s birth cavity after a miscarriage, is the number of highly respected physicians of the day who were fooled by it. This became the subject of scandal and satirical mockery, most notably by famous artist and pictorial satirist William Hogarth, who was critical of the gullibility of the so-called men of science in particular and of the general public more broadly, producing satirical cartoons about hoaxes of the day such as that of Mary Toft and Scratching Fanny. See for instance below, Hogarth's Cunicularii, or The Wise Men of Godliman in Consultation (1726) illustrating Mary Toft and her rabbit babies, and his Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism (1762) featuring references to both Mary Toft and Scratching Fanny, as well as other contemporary examples of secular and religious credulity.

I mentioned a couple of hoaxes that Edgar Allan Poe was involved in, but in fact the Museum of Hoaxes documents a number of others here. As it turns out Poe was quite interested in hoaxes, not only perpetrating them but debunking them, as he attempted to do with the famous chess-playing Turk automaton, which appeared to be a mechanical device that could play and win against living opponents. Of course, as Poe suspected, there was an expert chess player hidden inside the machine (though not as he imagined in the body of the Turk itself, but in the mechanism beneath it) who was making the actual moves by means of a pantograph-like connection to the Turkish automaton above his head. The Mechanical Turk came with the Industrial Revolution, when machines were beginning to replace the labour of people. The idea of an actual thinking machine therefore played into the fears people might have of being replaced by machines.

The Mechanical Turk was invented by one Wolfgang von Kempelen who designed the speaking machine that Charles Wheatstone constructed and improved on that I mentioned in the “Erasmus Darwin” video. Interestingly, Poe used the name von Kempelen in another of his hoaxes. He published a newspaper article claiming that a German chemist named Baron von Kempelen had discovered an alchemical process to transform lead into gold, in the hopes of dissuading the inevitable gold rush that was about to ensue after reports of gold in California. One might imagine this was also a swipe at the creator of the Mechanical Turk as well.

One of my favourite hoaxes is the fictitious theologian Franz Bibfeldt. It began as a invented footnote in a student term paper, and eventually grew into an enormous in-joke. Academics and their senses of humour!

Speaking of academics, some scholars believe that Marco Polo’s Travels were a hoax, and that he never actually visited China, but instead based the book on second-hand accounts, due to omissions and inconsistencies in his record. There is much debate on this text, and ultimately it’s probably unprovable one way or the other. Of course the medieval period was full of faked holy relics — you can imagine how easy it would be to fake the finger bone of a saint or some such, and how lucrative it would be for the church donation box to have such relics. I mentioned perhaps the most amusing example of this in the Holy Prepuce, the supposed foreskin of Christ, in the Christmas video “The Twelve Days of Christmas”.

Of course sometimes writers can be taken in by hoaxes, as in the famous case of The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, who seems to have been taken in by a kind of crazy pseudo-history book about the supposed continued bloodline of Christ, co-written by Doctor Who scriptwriter Henry Lincoln, if that gives you any sense of the level of fantasy involved here, called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which was itself based on ‘evidence’ created by a surrealist hoax perpetrated by one Pierre Plantard and his confederates in the 1960’s. According to both books, the secret society known as the Priory of Sion, and the the Knights Templar preserved the Holy Grail, which was not the cup of Christ, but actually the secret bloodline of Christ and Mary Magdalen, which ran through the Merovingian royal family and right up to the present day, with secret messages and clues to its existence hidden in the art and architecture of the middle ages and renaissance. At least the convolutedness of Dan Brown’s plot lives up to the convolutedness of the trail of this hoax!

Apparently Plantard was trying to fabricate a connection between himself and the medieval French Merovingian royal family (and denounced the whole thing as fiction once the holy bloodline business had been introduced by Lincoln and his co-writers), and this is an interesting parallel with the hoax of the Vestiarium Scoticum, a supposedly old manuscript that established the provenance of the clan tartans in Scotland. This hoax was perpetrated by John and Charles Allen who were trying to claim they were the grandsons of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Unfortunately, though it was all made up, many of the tartan patterns are still considered as genuinely old and therefore official. As with the Da Vinci Code, which generated considerable tourist traffic to sites mentioned in the book, sometimes hoaxes get out of hand and take on a life of their own.

And it seems that the spirit of our current age is such that we want to believe in ancient or secret origins to things, and the easy availability of vast amounts of information appears (perhaps surprisingly) to make it easier to spread misinformation — so that we’re often taken in by conspiracy theories or other such hoaxes. If only our gullibility were just the result of too many Tom Collinses!

]]>Spirit of the AgeEnlisting Imagination under the Banner of ScienceMark SundaramWed, 16 Mar 2016 22:40:18 +0000http://www.alliterative.net/blog/2016/3/16/enlisting-imagination53b1a859e4b037526d8e159f:53bf2b11e4b0228b71b8ae4e:56e9cdb65559866ae9117937As a bit of a departure, this week’s video isn’t about the etymology of a single word, but about a person who had an important impact on both science and language, Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles:

The idea of doing a person-centred video rather than using a word as a jumping off point was suggested to me by Theo Rodriguês in his response to my request for feedback over the summer, and the result is something of an epic, at nearly 20 minutes my longest video yet. Erasmus Darwin was the first candidate to come to mind for this project, since even though I mentioned him already (in “Coach”, “Clue”, and “Gimlet”), there was still so much more to say about him. Darwin is interesting not only for his wide-ranging scientific interests, but also for his word coining and literary efforts. He is the 770th most quoted source in the Oxford English Dictionary, and that ranking includes multi-author sources such as the Bible and the Times. Darwin provides 68 instances of the first known evidence for a new word (ranking him as 511th in the OED), and a further 204 earliest citations for new senses of existing words (thus coming in at a ranking of 548). Not bad for a person not principally known for his body of literature. There is one article in particular that I’m indebted to for this video, Desmond King-Hele’s “Erasmus Darwin, Man of Ideas and Inventor of Words” (see show notes for source info). Darwin began his literary career early on with a published poem about the Prince of Wales, but mainly he is known for scientific writings, including what I find most interesting about him, poetry about science. This is a perfect example of the interdisciplinary ideal, and his stated intention to “enlist imagination under the banner of science” is the perfect motto for the recent boom in science communication (about which more below). The other major inspiration for this video was seeing rapper Baba Brinkman perform his Rap Guide to Evolution a year ago. I noticed a real parallel between what Baba was doing and what Darwin was trying to accomplish in his day, popularizing and teaching science through poetry. Indeed for a while Darwin was quite successful, with his writings becoming the science “bible” for literary types, especially the Romantics. Makes sense, since they were really into the natural world Darwin was describing, and he did so in such reverential and downright spiritual terms. Exactly the sort of thing the Romantics loved. (See my video “Sublime” for more on the Romantics). Like the Romantics too, Darwin was also something of a social activist and revolutionary. He was a staunch abolitionist, and wanted to set up a dispensary for the poor. He also strongly supported religious toleration and freedom of the press. And finally, Darwin is also an excellent example of the interconnected world, with many social connections and people he helped or inspired. I only touched on a small number of the possible connections in the video (and in this blog), but this concept map image from my database (created with TheBrain software) gives something of an idea of the complexity involved.

Taking a closer look at Darwin’s scientific investigations, he was well connected in the scientific community, for instance keeping up a correspondence with geologist James Hutton, whose contributions to evolutionary science I touched on in the “Fossil” video. Actually, Darwin’s connection to evidence for evolution stretches back to his own father, who found the first known specimen of a fossilized plesiosaur, not that they knew what it was at the time. Darwin’s own speculations about evolution go beyond just the origins of life; his great poem The Temple of Nature also describes the evolution of civilization, including the development of language:

"From these dumb gestures first the exchange beganOf viewless thought in bird, and beast, and man;And still the stage by mimic art displaysHistoric pantomime in modern days;And hence the enthusiast orator affordsForce to the feebler eloquence of words.

"Thus the first Language, when we frown'd or smiled,Rose from the cradle, Imitation's child;Next to each thought associate sound accords,And forms the dulcet symphony of words;The tongue, the lips articulate; the throatWith soft vibration modulates the note;Love, pity, war, the shout, the song, the prayerForm quick concussions of elastic air.

"Hence the first accents bear in airy ringsThe vocal symbols of ideal things,Name each nice change appulsive powers supplyTo the quick sense of touch, or ear or eye.Or in fine traits abstracted forms suggestOf Beauty, Wisdom, Number, Motion, Rest;Or, as within reflex ideas move,Trace the light steps of Reason, Rage, or Love.The next new sounds adjunctive thoughts recite,As hard, odorous, tuneful, sweet, or white.The next the fleeting images selectOf action, suffering, causes and effect;Or mark existence, with the march sublimeO'er earth and ocean of recording Time.

According to his idea then, language developed gradually out of gesture and expression, eventually developing the ability to express more and more abstract ideas. Darwin always included copious explanatory notes with his poetry, so as he goes on to explain about this passage:

“There are two ways by which we become acquainted with the passions of others: first, by having observed the effects of them, as of fear or anger, on our own bodies, we know at sight when others are under the influence of these affections. So children long before they can speak, or understand the language of their parents, may be frightened by an angry countenance, or soothed by smiles and blandishments. Secondly, when we put ourselves into the attitude that any passion naturally occasions, we soon in some degree acquire that passion; hence when those that scold indulge themselves in loud oaths and violent actions of the arms, they increase their anger by the mode of expressing themselves; and, on the contrary, the counterfeited smile of pleasure in disagreeable company soon brings along with it a portion of the reality, as is well illustrated by Mr. Burke. (Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful.) These are natural signs by which we understand each other, and on this slender basis is built all human language. For without some natural signs no artificial ones could have been invented or understood, as is very ingeniously observed by Dr. Reid. (Inquiry into the Human Mind.)”

Some other passages worth quoting here include the full description of the Big Bang and Big Crunch, which I abbreviated in the video, as it is such a wonderful bit of poetry:

Roll on, ye Stars! exult in youthful prime,Mark with bright curves the printless steps of Time;Near and more near your beamy cars approach,And lessening orbs on lessening orbs encroach; —Flowers of the sky! ye too to age must yield,Frail as your silken sisters of the field!Star after star from Heaven's high arch shall rush,Suns sink on suns, and systems systems crush,Headlong, extinct, to one dark center fall,And Death and Night and Chaos mingle all!— Till o'er the wreck, emerging from the storm,Immortal Nature lifts her changeful form,Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame,And soars and shines, another and the same.

I also referred to a “pasta” experiment that may have been the inspiration for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Here’s the experiment in question, described in the notes to The Temple of Nature: “in paste composed of flour and water, which has been suffered to become acescent, the animalcules called eels, vibrio anguillula, are seen in great abundance; their motions are rapid and strong … even the organic particles of dead animals may, when exposed to a due degree of warmth and moisture, regain some degree of vitality”. In addition to life sciences, Darwin also made important contributions to meteorology, explaining cloud formation, weather fronts, and suggesting the utility of weather maps, and invented weather measuring instruments, and as I mentioned in the video, he coined such terms as anemology and devaporate.

Darwin attempted yet another replication of the natural world in his creation of a mechanical bird, an important milestone in both the fields of aviation and animatronics, as we now call it—though Darwin didn’t invent that word, it was Walt Disney. Here’s Darwin’s sketches of his mechanical bird and an earlier sketch of a copying machine, the bigrapher, before he went on to develop the polygrapher which he handed over to Greville to no avail, as mentioned in the video:

Darwin was a great supporter of the work on steam power of Watt and Boulton, and even came up with his own design for a steam-powered car in 1763, which he offered to Boulton to develop, but alas Boulton like Greville never developed it, and six years later Nicholas-Joseph Cugnot build the first steam-powered automobile. Darwin did, however, manage to put into practise numerous improvements to the carriage, important to him since he spent much of his time travelling the countryside making house calls on his patients. He made his carriage more stable, with a smoother ride, and devised a novel steering system still used in cars today, though known as Ackermann steering, since Darwin didn’t want to patent the idea himself, and it was “reinvented” by Georg Lankensperger and subsequently patented in England by his agent Rudolph Ackermann. But perhaps spare a thought for Erasmus Darwin next time you’re behind the wheel of a car.

In the video I mention his crest and motto “e conchis omnia” (‘everything from shells’); here’s the original crest:

You can see the three shells on the diagonal banner in the middle. For Darwin, the shell becomes a symbol of the creation of life and by extension the famous imagery of Venus on the shell in Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus”, especially in light of the idea of the creation of life:

Witness this passage from The Temple of Nature:

Rose young Dione from the shoreless main;Type of organic Nature! source of bliss!Emerging Beauty from the vast abyss!Sublime on Chaos borne, the Goddess stood,And smiled enchantment on the troubled flood;The warring elements to peace restored,And young Reflection wondered and adored."Now paused the Nymph,—The Muse responsive cries,Sweet admiration sparkling in her eyes,"Drawn by your pencil, by your hand unfurl'd,Bright shines the tablet of the dawning world;Amazed the Sea's prolific depths I view,And Venus rising from the waves in You!

Furthermore, there might be a Venus reference in the frontispiece to The Temple of Nature. De Rerum Natura by Lucretius, a major inspiration for Darwin’s creation poem, opens with an invocation to Venus as a symbol of creation, and if you compare the frontispiece of the translation of Lucretius written by John Evelyn you can spot an interesting parallel:

The curious thing is in both cases the “Venus” figure is pictured with many breasts, a motif now associated with a cult image of Artemis at the temple of Ephesus (though there’s now some dispute about whether they’re breasts or something else on the statue). Here’s an image of the Artemis of Ephesus, similar to Egyptian artistic style, that would have been known at the time:

I’d be very interested in hearing from anyone who might know what’s going on here with the many breasts motif. The figure must be meant to represent Venus, so perhaps the many breasted Artemis figure was thought at the time to be Venus? Also, is the one frontispiece a direct reference to the other, or is this a common motif? It’s curious to say the least. It’s especially intriguing in light of Darwin’s explanatory note about the Venus passage in his poem:

The hieroglyphic figure of Venus rising from the sea supported on a shell by two tritons, as well as that of Hercules armed with a club, appear to be remains of the most remote antiquity. As the former is devoid of grace, and of the pictorial art of design, as one half of the group exactly resembles the other; and as that of Hercules is armed with a club, which was the first weapon. The Venus seems to have represented the beauty of organic Nature rising from the sea, and afterwards became simply an emblem of ideal beauty; while the figure of Adonis was probably designed to represent the more abstracted idea of life or animation. Some of these hieroglyphic designs seem to evince the profound investigations in science of the Egyptian philosophers, and to have outlived all written language; and still constitute the symbols, by which painters and poets give form and animation to abstracted ideas, as to those of strength and beauty in the above instances.

And next, some interesting extra connections. In addition to being an astronomer, Herschel was also a composer, though he’s now more known for his astronomical contributions than his musical ones, but nevertheless there’s another connection with composer Haydn. And as for Haydn and Ann Home, the libretto she wrote for The Creation was not the original but an alternative text meant to replace an earlier clumsy one that had apparently been translated from English to German and back to English (so imagine the Google-like translation errors!), but this was not the first musical collaboration between the two. Haydn had earlier set a number of Home’s poems to music, so I suppose she was returning the favour. Home’s husband John Hunter and his friend Edward Jenner also have a small footnote in the story of evolutionary science, I suppose, not that they would have known it at the time. Jenner was the first person to describe the special adaptation the cuckoo chicks use in the process of brood parasitism (which you can hear more about in my video “Cuckold”). It had been believed that the adult cuckoo depositing its eggs in another bird’s nest knocked the other eggs out, but as Jenner described to Hunter in a letter published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society:

The singularity of [the cuckoo chick’s] shape is well adapted to these purposes; for, different from other newly hatched birds, its back from the scapula downwards is very broad, with a considerable depression in the middle. This depression seems formed by nature for the design of giving a more secure lodgement to the egg of the Hedge-sparrow, or its young one, when the young Cuckoo is employed in removing either of them from the nest. When it is about twelve days old, this cavity is quite filled up, and then the back assumes the shape of nestling birds in general.

And for yet another connection to a previous video, Darwin’s friend Boulton had once employed Rudolf Erich Raspe, writer of the Baron Munchausen stories, which I mentioned in the “Freebooting”.

And finally we return to the topic of science communication. In a 2013 episode of The Infinite Monkey Cage, co-hosted by Brian Cox, the panel, including James Burke, discuss the state of science communication. In the discussion they don’t mention YouTube at all as a platform for science communication, but Burke predicts a renaissance of science communication online, and in the years since then this prediction has been borne out with the popularity of such YouTube channels as SciShow, MinutePhysics, Veritasium, SmarterEveryDay, and Periodic Videos. In many ways, modern media like YouTube or Baba Brinkman’s “peer-reviewed” Rap Guides to science topics have indeed led to a science communication renaissance in which imagination has well and truly been enlisted under the banner of science, and a “renaissance” man like Erasmus Darwin would surely have approved.

Update: It seems the multi-breasted Artemis/Diana figure might have become a general Nature symbol in the Renaissance. That would make sense for frontispieces for On the Nature of Things and The Temple of Nature. So maybe they don't represent Diana or Venus, but some generalized Nature figure? Or maybe there are elements of both Diana and Venus subsumed into this figure? Again, any additional information anyone has would be greatly appreciated.

]]>Enlisting Imagination under the Banner of ScienceGlossed in TranslationwordsvideoMark SundaramWed, 24 Feb 2016 16:18:13 +0000http://www.alliterative.net/blog/2016/2/23/glossed-in-translation53b1a859e4b037526d8e159f:53bf2b11e4b0228b71b8ae4e:56cce52eb09f95b2510e8e97This week’s video is about the development of a country name that also became a common noun, “Japan”:

This video originates in the fact that the English name Japan appears to be an unrelated exonym to the native name Nippon, when actually they come from the same Chinese origin. By the way, the name is sometimes more fully given as Nippon-koku meaning “the State of Japan”, and this might be reflected in some of the early versions of the name in Europe such as Marco Polo’s Chipangu. There are conflicting stories as to who first started to use the phrase meaning “sun’s origin” to refer to the region. According the the American Heritage Dictionary, it was Japanese scholars who had studied Chinese who began to use the phrase around 670 CE (during the Tang Dynasty). Alternatively, Henry Dyer reports (see sources on the show notes page) that in 607 (during the Chinese Sui dynasty) the Emperor of Japan is supposed to have sent a letter to the Court of China with the greeting “A letter from the sovereign of the Sun-rise country to the sovereign of the Sun-set country”. However, another story claims that it was the Chinese Empress Wu Zetian of the later Tang dynasty who ordered the change of name. Of course the sun is an important cultural symbol in Japan, and one of the most important deities in Shinto religion and Japanese mythology is the sun goddess Amaterasu. The Emperors of Japan were held to be descended from her.

The European aruquebus first arrived in Japan in the hands of the Portuguese aboard a Chinese ship which came ashore on the island of Tanegashima in 1543. After a demonstration of duck shooting, the Lord of the island purchased the guns at great expense, and after a few initial technical hiccups, they started manufacturing and even improving on them. The European guns arrived in Japan during a time of civil wars called the Sengoku period from around 1467 to 1603, which ended with the Tokugawa shogunate and the ensuing Edo period, a time not only of isolationism but relative peace, and much has been made of the fact that the Japanese henceforth gave up firearms and returned to the sword, so that when in 1854 Commodore Matthew Perry led the US fleet to forcibly reopen Japan to relations and trade, they seemed to have little knowledge of firearms. You can read about this story in detail in Noel Perin’s Giving up the Gun: Japan’s Reversion to the Sword, 1543-1879, or have a look at Jabzy’s excellent on-the-scene videos about Europeans in Japan and Guns in Japan. Of the Japanese improvements to the Portuguese arquebus, Perrin writes: “They developed a serial firing technique to speed up the flow of the bullets. They increased the caliber of the guns to increase each bullet’s effectiveness, and they ordered waterproof lacquered cases to carry the matchlocks and gunpowder in … Japanese gunmakers were busy refining the comparatively crude Portuguese firing mechanism — developing, for example, a helical main spring and an adjustable trigger-pull. They also devised a gun accessory — unknown, so far as I am aware, in Europe — which enabled a matchlock to be fired in the rain.”

Now there were a number of etymologies I didn’t have time to include in the video, but the words for the various goods that led the Europeans to Asia are quite interesting and instructive. First the word "lacquer", one of the main focusses of the video, which comes not from Japanese or Chinese but ultimately from the Indian language Sanskrit word lākṣā referring to a red dye (not black, you note), which becomes Hindi lākh, then Persian lāk, which becomes lacre in Portuguese, Spanish, and French to refer to a kind of sealing wax, before moving into English as "lacquer". The source and meaning of the word is somewhat debated. It might be a variant of Sanskrit rahk and thus come from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning “colour, dye”. Or it might come from Sanskrit laksha meaning “salmon” (and thus be related to English "lox") in reference to its colour. But I think my favourite explanation is that the Sanskrit word means literally “one hundred thousand” in reference to the large numbers of insects that are needed to produce the lac. Called lac insects, they infest a tree in large numbers and secrete a resinous pigment which is then harvested and processed to produce shellac — yes that’s where that word comes from, because the lac flakes are kind of shell-like in appearance.

Shellac also used to be used to make gramophone records and some kinds of hard candies (so beware, vegans, as they contain animal products). Shellac is a calque or loan translation of the French laque en écailles. And the slang term "to shellac" as in “to beat soundly” probably comes from the idea of “to finish (off)”. And on the subject of slang terms, "to be japanned" also has a slang sense, to be ordained into the church, in reference to the black coat of the clergy, reminiscent of the black finish on that japanned furniture.

Silk was another draw to Asia, along what is referred to as the silk road, an over-land trade route. Early on it carried silks from China to ancient Greece, and that’s a clue to the etymology of the word “silk”. Old English seolc comes from Latin sericus, from Greek σηρικός ‎(sērikós). Serikos is the adjective form of Seres, the Greek name for the people from whom the goods came from, presumably a group in China, and it has been suggested that the word might come from the Chinese word si meaning “silk”, in Manchurian sirghe and Mongolian sirkek, so from the trade good, to the name of a people, and back to the name of the trade good again, in an interesting parallel to the progress of Japan to japanning.

“Porcelain” has perhaps the most surprising etymology. It comes from Latin porcella “young sow”, the feminine diminutive form of porcus meaning “pig”, thus related to our modern English word "pork". The Italian porcellana was also used to refer to a kind of cowrie shell, probably because of its resemblance to a female pig’s genitalia. Yes, really. And the shiny finish of porcelain was reminiscent of the shiny shells, hence the name was transferred over. So think about that the next time you eat pork off of some fine porcelain!

And finally “spice”, which comes from Latin species meaning “kind, sort” and originally “appearance” as it comes from a Latin root specio “to see” from a Proto-Indo-European root *spek- “to observe” which gives us a large number of modern English derivatives, like "species", "spy", and "special". In the plural, Latin species went from meaning “kind, sort” to “goods, wares”, probably from the sense of a particular kind of merchandise, and eventually narrowed in meaning further still to the word “spice” as we know it today, perhaps an indication that it was the most particularly important trade good. Indeed the extreme value of spices from Asia would certainly support this. And contrary to popular myth, during the middle ages they never used spices to hide the taste of rotten meat. Spices were far too expensive to waste in that way and it probably wouldn’t work anyway. To coin a phrase, even a hundred thousand special trade goods can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s… well.

]]>Glossed in TranslationFrom the Sublime to the RomanticvideowordsMark SundaramWed, 03 Feb 2016 23:58:50 +0000http://www.alliterative.net/blog/2016/2/3/from-the-sublime-to-the-romantic53b1a859e4b037526d8e159f:53bf2b11e4b0228b71b8ae4e:56b28ae69f7266e23da00ff2This week’s video is on “sublime”, a word important to the romantic poets, but that also has deep roots in the ancient world and the middle ages:

It was the surprising etymology of sublime that kicked this one off, though the script is drawn in large part from my classroom teaching explaining the sublime and romanticism, as well as the importance of the medieval tradition to the 19th century. And working through this for the video, it seemed to me that there was a useful metaphorical connection to the idea of looking up, in both the sublime and in the gothic cathedrals of the high middle ages. Another important theme here is the drive to differentiate oneself from what went before. Most cultural movements do this sort of thing one way or another, and again there were various parallels there. Also, the ongoing language peeving today is useful to keep in mind in this context. Language is constantly changing, and current language trends are no different from the transformation from Latin into the romance languages. And finally, since this video was coming out close to Valentine’s Day, it seemed appropriate to look at the later development of the word “romantic” and examine what it also owes to the medieval courtly love tradition. This too involves a kind of “looking up”, with the male lover putting his beloved up on a pedestal and worshipping her in a quasi-religious/feudal way. This is of course profoundly misogynistic as it doesn’t leave her the capacity to be human, but forces a divine status on her which no human can live up to, but perhaps that’s another story. But in any case, this too also owes a debt to the classical world, as this model of love comes not only from the medieval troubadours from the South of France, but also from the Roman poet Ovid, whose works the Ars Amatoria and Amores (themselves, ironically, to a large extent parodying earlier cliches about love!) were very influential to the courtly love tradition. So in a sense, I guess, this counts as my Valentine’s Day video for the year! (You can see last year's Valentine's Day video "Cuckold" here.)

Perhaps the most common way people today hear this word is in the phrase “from the sublime to the ridiculous”. The full expression is “from the sublime to the ridiculous is but one step”. The expression seems to derive from The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine, the great 18th century English-American thinker and revolutionary (who certainly had an antagonistic relationship with Edmund Burke): “The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again.” Napoleon, one time great hero of the Romantics (until they became disillusioned with him), picked up on Paine and said “Du sublime au ridicule il n’y a qu’un pas” giving us our modern phrase. Again, it’s a question of high and low.

And in addition to the psychological term subliminal, there are the scientific terms sublimate and sublimation, which are formed from the same Latin sources. Sublimate in chemistry means to change state from a solid directly to a gas, and comes from medieval and early modern alchemical terminology. Sublimation is used in (Freudian) psychological sense to refer to the process of converting an impulse into a more socially acceptable activity. Both of these have the metaphorical sense of raising something up.

In the video I indicated on screen (without going into it in detail) that the word lintel actually has two etymons, limen meaning “threshold, lintel, entrance” and limes meaning “boundary, path” (and also giving us the word “limit”). This is a case of the two similar sounding words coming together to produce the derived word. Interestingly both words seem to come ultimately from the same Latin source, limus “sidelong, askew, askance”, with the idea that limes refers to a cross path bounding two fields. But also interesting is that limen in Latin seems to refer indiscriminately to both the lintel at the top and the sill or threshold at the bottom of a window or door respectively. I already covered the etymology of the word “sill” in the video, but also from a Germanic source is threshold, related to the word thresh and from the Old English verb þrescan “to thresh, beat”, the idea being that a threshold is something you tread on. It comes ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root ‌‌*terə- “to rub, turn”, which has a great many English derivatives.

Jane Austen makes a only brief appearance in this video, but in a lot of ways she touches on a number of the different connections presented in the video. Her novel Northanger Abbey, in addition to satirizing the sentimental and gothic novels, also contains a discussion about aesthetics in which her heroine Catherine Morland learns about the categories of the beautiful, the sublime, and the picturesque from her love interest Henry Tilney. And the title of Sense and Sensibility makes a pun on the different meanings — sense as in having good sense, and sensibility as in having a strong emotional reaction. And in Pride and Prejudice, when Charlotte Lucas agrees to the obsequious Mr Collins, she explains to the surprised Elizabeth Bennet that “I am not romantic, you know; I never was”, though probably in the broader sense of romantic meaning fanciful, sentimental, or idealistic. And it’s important to remember that Jane Austen was writing at the same time as many of those Romantic poets.

As for the Romantics themselves, they weren’t exactly a unified group. Though Goethe and Herder kicked it all off with their Sturm und Drang poetry, they wouldn’t really have thought of themselves as part of the Romantic movement, and in fact later on pulled back from some of their proto-Romantic ideas to what’s referred to as the Weimar classical school, a kind of compromise between Neoclassicism and Romanticism. And as for the English Romantic poets, the second generation (Shelley, Byron, Keats, etc.) though initially being inspired by the earlier (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge), didn’t always look up to them (see what I did there?). Byron found Wordsworth’s use of everyday language and style to be facile and unsophisticated. That everyday language, by the way was part of Wordsworth’s definition of the ideal poet. He wanted to use the “plainer and more emphatic language” of the common man, but “purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust” (Preface to the Lyrical Ballads). So though the ideal poet is “a man speaking to men”, he qualifies this as “a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind”. Coleridge, who collaborated with Wordsworth on the Lyrical Ballads but had no hand in the Preface, which was added later, called Wordsworth out in his Biographia Literaria for these and other contradictions and inconsistencies, so they didn’t always see eye to eye either. And of course Romanticism doesn’t really end with the Romantic period. In British literature, we’re accustomed to think of the later part of the 19th century as the Victorian period, but many of the elements of Romanticism continue into the later period, such as drawing inspiration from the medieval (think Tennyson, William Morris, and the Pre-Raphaelites), and the distinction isn’t really made anyway in continental Europe.

Another of the elements of Romanticism that’s worth further discussion is their sense of history and time. In addition to the discovery and interest in ruins, as I mentioned in the video, there was an important literary component here. Macpherson began his Ossian forgery by collecting folktales from the Scottish Highlands, much as the Brothers Grimm would do in Germany some years later. And there was also a kind of cult of Shakespeare, a great reverence of the playwright, with such proponents as Johann Herder and August Schlegel (who translated Shakespeare into German), and the notion that one should go out into the English countryside to really read the Bard properly. Related to the Ossian poem, by the way, is the poetry of Thomas Chatterton — I used a painting of him in the video to suggest the idea of emotion.

Though he wasn’t himself a Romantic — he was from the middle of the 18th century and committed suicide at the age of 17 — he was quite influential on the English Romantic poets. He is perhaps most remembered now for forging “medieval” romances under the pseudonym of Thomas Rowley, much like Macpherson did with the Ossian epic. No wonder then that Romantics liked him so much! Coleridge does something similar with “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (perhaps his most famous contribution to the Lyrical Ballads), though he never claimed it was a genuine medieval poem, he just wrote it in that style.

As for medieval architecture, I emphasized the elongated proportions and verticality of the gothic architecture, but the other effect of this is on the light in gothic cathedrals. The advent of the flying buttress, which transferred the outward force of a wall downward to the ground, allowed for the gothic arches to be made very large, which meant they could put in large elongated stained-glass windows, and the gothic cathedrals would be constructed so that the high altar would be the brightest part of the church, while the nave, where the church-goers would sit, would be relatively dark. The symbolic implication of this is fairly obvious. Perhaps the most striking example of this sort of thing (though not actually a cathedral) is Sainte-Chapelle in Paris.

I mentioned gothic revival architecture, and used the example of the British Houses of Parliament, the Palace of Westminster, as an iconic example. Pugin by the way, was technically the assistant architect to chief architect Charles Barry, though there’s some controversy as to how much of the work was Barry’s and how much was Pugin’s — Pugin was known as a pioneer of gothic revival, whereas Barry was more known for neoclassical architecture, for what it’s worth. (Oh and for extra connection fans, Barry was assisted in the quarrying of the stone for the building by geologist William “Strata” Smith, who you may remember from my previous video “Fossil”). But it’s significant that gothic revival style was chosen for the rebuild after the earlier building was destroyed by fire in 1834, as it could be seen as a reaffirmation of the monarchy, which traces its origins back to the middle ages. This was then a rejection of the neoclassical republicanism associated with, for instance, the United States of America, whose government buildings like the Capitol are built in the neoclassical style.

The US specifically modelled themselves in that respect on the Roman Republic, with their Latinate terms like Senate and Congress. Canada too built its parliament in the gothic revival style as an explicit alignment with medieval monarchy and their British rulers.

The original Canadian Parliament Buildings were built in the mid 18th century in a highly ornate gothic style. After the original Centre Block burned down in 1916 (one hundred years ago to the day as I write this), it was replaced with a slightly less ornate but still gothic revival style building.

And finally, as for the period preceding Romanticism, I was playing a bit fast and loose, consistently using the term Neoclassical for simplicity’s sake, but in fact the 18th century is co-occurrence of a number of interconnected trends. Other terms used to refer to the period include the Age of Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. I suppose at their heart what they all have in common was an appeal to reason and rationality over pure emotion, a rejection of medieval religiosity in favour of human centred concerns, and an alignment with ancient Greece and Rome which were thought to embody these notions. In the video I used the images of Denis Diderot and his Encyclopédie to represent the rationality of the Enlightenment, a good iconic example. Diderot himself argued, as many at the time did, that reason was necessary to keep emotion in check, but of course there are many other figures and works reflective of Enlightenment thinking. I could no more cover this complex topic than I could give anything more than the cursory thumbnail sketch of Romanticism that I did through the lens of etymology, but hopefully this gives a new perspective (looking up or otherwise), to these complex periods.

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